ENoLL - European Network of Living Labs

Wondering what four days at OLLD26 actually looks like? Here's the shape of it.

It starts in Brussels on 29 September with a Policy Event bringing together EU institutions and the Living Lab community, running alongside Learning Lab Day 0 for anyone new to Living Labs. Then the whole conference moves to Antwerp for 30 September and 1 October, with panel sessions, research presentations, hands-on workshops, garden talks and networking events packed into the "A Room With A Zoo" venue. The last day, 2 October, is dedicated to field visits across Belgian Living Labs, so you get to see the theory in practice before you head home.

The full downloadable agenda is live on the programme page, so you can map out exactly which sessions matter to you.

Four days, two cities, and honestly, more good sessions than you'll be able to fit in.

OLLD26, Brussels & Antwerp, 29 September – 2 October 2026
https://openlivinglabdays.pulse.ly/d5iotnfgvi

Five weeks to go. If OLLD26 has been sitting on your list as a someday thing, this should be the point where it stops being one.

Every year someone tells us afterwards that they nearly didn't come. The travel, the fee, two days away from a project that couldn't spare them. Usually we hear about it too late to help.

So it's worth knowing what's actually on the ticket page. Members and Non-Members. A One-Day ticket if your week won't stretch further. A Presenters and Organisers rate if you're running a session. Rates for students and for startups. Tickets for colleagues joining from low and middle income countries, based on where your institution sits in the World Bank's classification. Group bookings for five or more from the same organisation.

Two things could get missed at checkout. The Social and Networking Dinner and the Networking Poster Session are booked separately, they aren't part of the base ticket. And posters need to be submitted to [email protected] before 1 September, so that one is a next-week job.

Not sure which category is yours? Send us a message, that's an easy one for us to answer.

Who are you hoping to run into in Antwerp this year?

OLLD26, Brussels and Antwerp, 29 September to 2 October 2026
https://openlivinglabdays.pulse.ly/5jqj5leu2y

Before OLLD26 properly begins, there's a whole day in Brussels worth knowing about.

Policy Event, on 29 September, splits into two parallel tracks. If policy is your world, the Policy Event brings the European Committee of the Regions and the Delegation of the Government of Catalonia together with the Living Lab community for a Policy Dialogue on European priorities, followed by an experiential afternoon session on Living Lab methodologies actually in action.

If you're newer to Living Labs, or want to go deeper into the fundamentals, Learning Lab Day 0 runs the same day at the ENoLL Office, with Basic and Intermediate tracks so you can pick the level that fits.

It's a genuinely useful way to arrive at the main conference already warmed up and connected to the right people.

Policy Event

29 September 2026, Brussels

https://openlivinglabdays.pulse.ly/buzovndhfe

Picture a Living Lab practitioner who reads English perfectly well on paper but finds a training delivered entirely in English, week after week, quietly exhausting by the third session.

We think about that person a lot, because plenty of skilled practitioners in our community are not first-language English speakers, and it is easy to assume a course like this caters more to the fluent majority.

The Virtual Learning Lab now runs in two tracks, and one of them was built with exactly that person in mind. Every lesson on the Self-Guided Track carries AI-generated subtitles in English, French, Spanish and Italian.

We want to be straight about the difference, because it is a real one. The Live Track runs in English, live with the trainer, the weekly premiere and the Q&A straight after it. The Self-Guided Track has no live component at all, so lessons open one after another as you finish each one, and you can read the subtitles at your own pace, in your own language.

Which means the choice between the two tracks is not only about your diary. If English is not your first language, that is a genuine reason to look at the Self-Guided Track first.

One honest note: the self-assessment that will grant you the Certificate of Competence is offered in English, so it is worth knowing that going in.

Registration is open, and everything is on the course page.

https://enoll.pulse.ly/dzxsldgwhg

Picture a room of Living Lab practitioners building small models of themselves out of LEGO bricks before the workshop has even properly started. That's how this OLLD26 workshop opens, and it's not an icebreaker for its own sake. Hilde Vandenhoudt and Leen Broeckx of LiCalab, the living and care lab at Thomas More University of Applied Sciences and OLLD26 co-organiser, built the hands-on workshop around a genuinely difficult problem: how do you design inclusive digital services for people who are already excluded from the tools you'd normally use to ask them? Drawing on lessons from a real digital health literacy co-creation project, Hilde and Leen guide participants through LEGO Serious Play, first building personas representing underserved groups, then racing through an ideation sprint to generate as many inclusive service ideas as possible, before prototyping and voting on the strongest ones as a group. Leen has spent over a decade managing LiCalab's panel of more than 350 citizens, care organisations and caregivers, and Hilde brings epidemiology and participatory action research experience from primary health care work across sub-Saharan Africa and Flanders. Between them, this is a workshop built from real fieldwork, not theory. You leave with practical guidelines for using LEGO Serious Play on your own complex challenges, not just a nice afternoon with bricks.

https://openlivinglabdays.pulse.ly/bvcnikv1sz

Some of you told us, more than once, that you wanted to do the Virtual Learning Lab and could not make the dates work.

We have heard it at events, in emails, and from Members who fully intended to join and then watched the weeks fill up without them.

This autumn there is a second way in.

The Self-Guided Track opens every lesson the moment you register. There is no weekly slot to protect, no cohort moving at a pace you have to match, and no waiting for the next intake, because it runs all year. Three calendar months of access from the day you register, and you take the all modules plus the introductory Week 0 in whatever order works for you.

The Live Track is still there for anyone who wants the trainer in the room. It keeps its weekly rhythm, and each lesson now opens with a live premiere and a live Q&A with the trainer.

Both share the same content and lead to the same certificates.

If you were one of the people who told us, thank you. This one came from you.

https://enoll.pulse.ly/l5sdwx3r1z

Imagine standing in a coffee break between sessions, and the person next to you, who works for an insurance company, starts swapping numbers with someone from a completely different sector, even though they've both lived in the same small town for years and never once spoken. That's the moment Gorazd Weiss from ZSI, the Centre for Social Innovation in Vienna, points to when he talks about what a Living Lab actually does.

ZSI has just joined ENoLL as an Innovation Partner, and this one feels overdue. Since 1988, ZSI has been asking a question most innovation conversations skip: what's the point of any of it if it doesn't have value for society? They've spent 35 years building answers, through projects like Careables, which helped makers and people with disabilities design assistive technology together, and RRI Tools, a toolbox on responsible research still used across Europe today.

"It's joint forces," says Elisabeth Unterfrauner, ZSI's Scientific Director and CEO. "Living Labs and social innovation go hand in hand." We think our Members will recognise a kindred spirit here.

Read the full story of how ZSI got here, and what they hope to build with our Community next: https://enoll.pulse.ly/kq7pxn8opg
Have you worked with ZSI on a project, or crossed paths with them at an event? Tell us about it in the comments.

A big thank you to our friends at Open to Innovate Living Lab for having us in Bologna last month, it was a real pleasure to be part of that room.

At We Make Future 2026, our Chairman Wim De Kinderen and our Head of Network Gabriella Quaranta joined Asia Guerreschi from Open to Innovate, part of Clust-ER Innovate, on a roundtable about one plain question: what does it actually take to build the city of the future?

Not more screens or sensors. The panel kept coming back to the same idea, that the real work is designing with the people who live in a city, not designing something clever and hoping they will use it. Open to Innovate showed us what that looks like close up, on their own turf, and we are grateful for the invitation.

As Gabriella Quaranta put it, “For ENoLL, participating in WMF was an opportunity to bring the Living Lab approach to a broader innovation community, while learning from other inspiring initiatives putting people at the center and co-creation in practice. Cities of the future won’t be built through technology alone, but through collaboration. Bringing the Living Lab approach, and the Network, to conversations like this helps ensure that innovation remains grounded in people’s needs and connected to the territories where change happens.”

Have you been part of a co-design process that actually changed how a place got built or used? We would love to hear about it in the comments.

More on the session here: https://enoll.pulse.ly/sdyv9nhqce