The differentiated enrolment of users in health and autonomy living labs in France

Living Labs (LLs) are organizations that promote innovations, often of a technological nature, through co-construction with their users. To this end, they duplicate places of everyday life and/or use technical platforms. In this article we focus on two LLs in Health and Autonomy (LLHA). After tracing the path on which the user became a central figure, we describe how stakeholders project these users’ usefulness in the processes of designing artefacts and institutionalizing LLHAs. Through a comparison, we then show that these users must be “found”. They first have to be identified, then brought to the LL, and then actually mobilized in projects. This shows differentiated processes for enrolling users, which can be either very small-scale and irregular, or more stable and reproduced.