Campus serves as a sustainable living lab, integrating sustainability into everyday campus operations, learning, and community life. Through ongoing initiatives and practices, Elon provides opportunities to explore, implement and advance sustainability in a community-based setting.
Experiential learning is a pillar of an Elon education, and understanding campus as a “living lab” allows students, faculty and staff to support sustainability on campus through hands-on work. The Elon community can participate in integrated lab lectures, inquiry-based introductory courses or sustainable research to better understand just how campus functions as a living lab.
First introduced in 1749 but popularized in 1990, the concept of a “living lab” incorporates real-world experiences and scientific experiments to generate new knowledge to advance sustainable initiatives. This model is typically seen in research, where projects take place in everyday environments as opposed to isolated scientific spaces such as a lab. Adopting the idea of a living lab integrates community participation, multidisciplinary work and real-world sustainable solutions that can later be scaled beyond the community level.
How can we interact with a “living lab?”
University campuses provide ideal sustainable living labs as they intrinsically function as a small town: combining centralized housing, dining, energy systems and transportation under one management system. On Elon’s campus in particular, waste management systems, energy regulation, green architecture, and behavioral change initiatives grounded in experiential learning provide an ideal environment to conduct sustainable research outside of a controlled environment.
Students, faculty and staff can support campus as a living lab by participating in workshops, taking interdisciplinary classes that emphasize sustainable behavior, providing feedback to campus partners on initiatives or participating in campus research or class projects related to sustainability.
Sustainable research: What is already being done?
Elon’s Sustainability Project Database highlights existing classes and undergraduate research projects that connect to sustainability. This database explores existing campus initiatives while also identifying gaps in sustainable research and curriculum on campus. Alongside this database, the Sustainable Faculty Scholars program supports faculty on campus who are interested in incorporating sustainable principles into their courses. Courses that incorporate sustainability-based curriculum while also supporting student and staff project interests have created a space within Elon’s living lab for constant campus development that follows community interest and priorities. Courses that cover sustainability-related topics can be seen throughout departments across campus, such as history, engineering, theatre and Elon’s core curriculum.
Sustainable research: What can be done?
The Sustainability Project Database is ever expanding, and students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to collaborate to continue developing this resource. Collaboration is primarily encouraged through proposing a project idea or research question. These proposals highlight what the Elon community would like to see as class projects or on-campus undergraduate research and provide space for these ideas to be explored in a formal academic setting. Existing proposals alongside new ideas can help inform curriculum development and proposal ideas while simultaneously highlighting contacts across campus who are interested in supporting specific sustainability initiatives.
Elon further supports sustainable research through a Sustainability Research Grant that applies to any and all majors. With an emphasis on sustainable development goals, research grants are awarded to students who contribute meaningfully to the knowledge base of sustainability as a broad discipline.
The Campus as a Living Lab program provides space for students, faculty and staff to advance sustainability initiatives on campus. All Elon community members are encouraged to contribute to potential project or research questions and collaborate across disciplines, schools, and departments to foster sustainable development. By modeling a living lab, Elon is advancing on-campus sustainability while developing a more comprehensive understanding of sustainable research and community engagement.