Addressing interconnected local and global challenges requires forms of inquiry and innovation capable of crossing disciplinary, organizational, sectoral, technological, cultural, and ecological boundaries. Although living labs have contributed significantly to user-centered innovation, real-world experimentation, co-creation, and collaborative learning, their limitations are increasingly recognized (Müller, 2026). The literature identifies conceptual ambiguity, temporary project structures, uncertain outcomes, weak institutionalization, power asymmetries, difficulties in recruiting and representing participants, and limited scalability and long-term evaluation (Stan & Tasente, 2025).

Living labs may also remain centered on predefined problems, identifiable stakeholders, managed participation, and relatively bounded experimental settings. Their user-centered orientation can unintentionally privilege officially recognized human stakeholders, while paying insufficient attention to the material objects, technologies, infrastructures, artistic artefacts, institutional arrangements, ecological processes, and more-than-human entities through which innovation is actually produced. Furthermore, the contribution of the arts is still frequently treated as supplementary, instrumental, or communicative rather than as a distinctive mode of inquiry and knowledge production.

This track proposes the concept of the interrlab as a way of advancing beyond these limitations while preserving the experimental and participatory strengths of the living lab model. The prefix interr- refers not only to interaction, but also to interrelation, interdependence, interruption, interrogation, and the opening of spaces between established domains. An interrlab is therefore not simply another type of laboratory. It is a relational, distributed, and experimental knowledge infrastructure through which heterogeneous participants can collectively investigate problems, negotiate meanings, create propositions, and transform the networks in which they participate.

Interrlabs bring together people, communities, artistic practices, scientific knowledge, technologies, material objects, institutional rules, places, narratives, affects, resources, and ecological processes. Rather than assuming that innovation is produced by autonomous individuals or organizations and subsequently transferred to users, the interrlab approaches knowledge and innovation as relational accomplishments that emerge through situated encounters among heterogeneous entities.