Rebound Effects in Living Labs

The effectiveness of sustainable product and service innovations is often restricted by limited market acceptance or unexpected consumption patterns. The latter includes rebound effects, which occur when resources liberated by savings are used for further consumption. Recently emerging research from the Living Lab is striving to address and anticipate challenges in innovation design by integrating users in prototyping and field testing product and service innovations. The paper "Rebound effects in Living Labs: Opportunities for monitoring and mitigating re-spending and time use effects in user integrated innovation design" by Johannes Buhl, Justus von Geibler, Laura Echternacht and Moritz Linder (all Wuppertal Institute) presents findings from a literature review on rebound effects and expert interviews identifying methods to monitor and measures to mitigate rebound effects in early innovation design via Living Lab research. Their findings show that Living Labs enable rebound research to monitor complex behaviour, offer the possibility to observe indirect time use and re-spending effects and enable rebound research to realise interventional designs.

The paper will be published in the Journal of Cleaner Production and is already available online.