Adventure Cards, Process Wheels, and a Vision for Digital Storytelling: Learning from Leonardo

This work examines the phenomenon of the Living Lab Transaction and several user-engagement innovation tools developed to maximize meaningful interactions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university located in the northeastern region of the United States. Although much of the research at MIT is focused outwardly on solving universal challenges such as poverty, world hunger, and global economic issues, many students, scholars, and staff intentionally use the 168-acre campus—located within the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts—as a working laboratory in which to experiment with ideas, inventions, technologies, and new ways of thinking [In recent years, MIT has demonstrated a significant commitment to using the campus as a test bed (i.e., “living labs”), as evidenced in the launch of an Office of Sustainability that advances the educational mission of the institute (2013), in the Plan for Action on Climate Change (2015), in the creation of a new full-time appointment (i.e., the “Living Lab Design Manager”) with responsibilities for cultivating research that uses the campus as a test bed for innovation (2016), and in the Pathways to Sustainable Leadership document (Campus Sustainability Task Force, 2017)]. New tools such as the Process Wheels, the Learning Adventure Card user interface/database, and the Discover Living Lab Web App, which are based on the conceptual Urban Living Lab Learning Frameworks (UL3), are introduced as examples of customizable, shared resources that cultivate leadership, team building, and creative problem-solving skills. The tools address common challenges that can thwart agility for project teams; they are designed to facilitate deeper learning and new ways of seeing by weaving together knowledge from fields such as cognitive science, fine arts, developmental psychology, philosophy, organizational behavior, applied mathematics (game theory), and from popular culture.