The Mason Living Labs Initiative encourages and supports students, faculty, and staff to pose questions, experiment, gather data, monitor changes, and propose novel solutions to a range of sustainability challenges associated with the George Mason University campus environment and its socio-environmental systems.
What is Mason as a Living Lab?
With nearly 1,000 acres of land, waterways, forests, and buildings, George Mason University’s campuses are a dynamic, living learning environment. With diverse and growing arrays of buildings, roadways, watercourses, and forests, the Mason campus complex faces the urgent challenge of becoming more sustainable and resilient. In this context, the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of Mason faculty, staff, and students are critically important resources. Recent and ongoing experiments in research and learning across campus spaces have included the Innovation Food Forest, the Honeybee Initiative, the Green Studio, and the Mason Arboretum.
Given the convergence of the Strategic Master Planning Cycle with the establishment of the Mason Sustainability Solutions Framework and the development of various action plans, the Living Labs Initiative will enlist the enormous talent and expertise on Mason campuses to help achieve Mason’s sustainability goals. Furthermore, with Mason’s commitment to campus sustainability, the Living Labs Initiative serves as a conduit to engage in sustainability oriented curricular and research development. Consequently, the Living Labs Initiative will propel Mason forward as a regional and national leader in sustainability, with explicit links to Mason’s entrepreneurship efforts so that our innovations can be widely adopted elsewhere.
Core Functions of the Living Labs Initiative:
– Strategic support with initiatives that are first getting off the ground
– Coordination of sustainability research initiatives taking place on Mason’s campuses
– Web presence and communication to amplify campus research and projects to the Mason community and beyond
– Data catalog for shared learning and understanding of sustainability topics on Mason’s campuses
Benefits of Mason as a Living Lab: There are numerous benefits for participating in the Living Labs Initiative. Projects undergo a review that ensures that project implementation in a living campus environment will be seamless. The projects receive strategic support to help get them started if they are in the inception phase, become part of a dynamic group with other living lab projects, get designated web space and communications support. Opportunities for securing funding or scaling up pilot projects will also be supported.
How to Engage: Submit your project to be part of the Initiative using this form. You can also get in touch via email at malila@gmu.edu.
We are collecting past and ongoing projects in our clearinghouse! Submit your living lab projects.
Apply for funding! We are accepting proposals for new and ongoing projects for the 2024 Mason’s Living Lab Research Funding!