These lines of work are aligned with current, real social challenges related to the cultural context that the library provides. These challenges  are periodically updated by the Library Living Panel, and they provide a very flexible framework for prioritised actions of different types, such as periodical activities, open workshops, public demonstrations of our own prototypes, scientific experiments open to the citizen participation, open debates and innovation projects with Public Institutions (such as research centers, universities, foundations) and also Companies.

In order an activity to take place in the Library Living Lab, the panel arrive to a consensus in three basic points:

• An actual current social challenge to be tackled.
• A specific innovation action (which could be a prototype, a novel service in test phase, a new use for a given technology, etc.).
• A measurable return to society, which can have the shape of a new service, a novel prototype, an open source code, among others.

An example of this approach for the activity “I am my own drawing“ can be seen below:

The tested prototypes, or the novel services developed, can be quickly delivered to society through the Network of Libraries, the Public Administration or local companies. This guarantees a channel for the scalability of the returns obtained and a direct impact of the achieved results.

The Library Living Lab has an inclusive approach, and all the users can participate with independence of its degree of involvement. The most active users (the alpha users) can lead the activities peer to peer with scientists, librarians and neighbors. The most lazy ones (the delta users) are also invited to participate as much as they wish in a specific way for each activity!

All the activities are documented in the web with multimedia contents.