Design a Social Lab

A Social Lab is a series of workshops that takes you on a collaborative problem-solving journey, starting with defining the challenge you want to tackle and ending with an action plan to test your interventions.

The tools within the Social Lab kit have been designed to allow you to use them independently or in combination with each other. How you use them to guide you in addressing your specific challenge is up to you. From creating empathy maps to developing intervention strategies and collaboration models, there’s a tool for every step of the way!

Below are two examples of Social Lab designs to guide and inspire you.

A complete Social Lab: from understanding to action

A complete Social Lab follows the six steps in the methodology and uses all 22 tools. It’ s run over four workshops, with time after the first and third workshops to engage with more stakeholders.

Workshop 1

2 days

Day 1

On the first day, you work to identify and map out the system boundaries, actors and interrelationships, and prepare the field research

Tools used: system boundaries, actors map, rich context, niche discovery.

Day 2

During the second day, you prepare the field study.

Tools used: actor dimensions, research questions.

Workshop 2

1 day

During this workshop, you analyse the interviews in order to identify contributing factors, causal relationships, and dynamics over time.
Firstly, summarise your interview insights.

Tools used: personas, connection circle, and causal loops system mapping.

Secondly, map your interrelated design challenges.

Tools used: design challenge map.

Workshop 3

1 day

This workshop has two main goals:

Define the desired outcomes, goals, and success criteria
Tools used: empathy map, value proposition.
Assess what should be changed in the system to achieve the desired outcomes
Tools used: intervention strategy.

Contact and invite new workshop participants
This can take a few days to several weeks, like doing the field research.

Workshop 4

1 day

The final workshop!
The first purpose is to co-create interventions with stakeholders to address the identified challenges, considering their perspectives and needs

Tools used: outcome map.

The second purpose of this workshop is to assess who is missing to achieve your goals. You might need to involve extra participants to define/co-create the interventions needed

Tools used: stakeholder mobilisation.

If this is the case, you will need an additional workshop to revise and refine the intervention model with them

Tools used: collaboration model, outcome map 2.0

Optional: Explore if and how you can deploy your strategy in other contexts – this would require another workshop day

Tools used: contextual variations and contextual outcome maps.

Prepare and conduct the pilot

Ranges in duration, depending on the complexity of your challenge, size of the pilot and time available

Test your strategy > Strategy test cards.
Develop prototypes for the critical aspects involved.
Conduct a pilot project to test the proposed interventions in a real setting and gather feedback from stakeholders > Piloting.
Refine the interventions based on the feedback received.
Implement, evaluate, and scale up.

A mini Social Lab: Learning the Social Lab methodology

To get an idea of the methodology and explore how it works, you can do a condensed version of a Social Lab. We recommend hosting three full-day workshops over three consecutive days, using the selected tools listed below to get the most out of each day and the Social Lab.

Workshop 1

1 day

Research hypotheses
Personas

Workshop 2

1 day

Connection circle
Causal loops mapping
Value proposition

Workshop 3

1 day

Intervention strategy
Outcome map

You can use additional tools where you think they may guide you in addressing your challenge.
Learn more about which tools can support your goals here.

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Explore our case study for more insight and top tips

How to enable a better everyday life for low-income groups in Germany

In 2023 we hosted a Social Lab in Berlin, bringing together 8 social enterprises and IKEA workers from across the value chain to explore how we could enable a better everyday life for single parents, refugees and migrants, first generation students, the elderly and persons with disabilities.