RixLivingLab is a space for exploring how technology can be designed with people, not just for them. We bring together researchers, practitioners, and communities, particularly people with learning disabilities, to co-create new ways of understanding, building, and using digital technologies. Our work focuses on inclusion, accessibility, and participation, ensuring that voices often excluded from innovation are central to the process.
What We Do
At RixLivingLab, we develop and study new approaches to designing technology through real-world, collaborative experimentation. This includes:
- Participatory AI and design:
Working alongside people with diverse communication and cognitive needs to shape how AI systems are imagined and built. - Accessible tools and interfaces:
Creating technologies that are easier to understand, control, and personalise, especially for people who are often underserved by mainstream systems. - Creative and embodied methods:
Using physical making, storytelling and visual communication to open up design processes. - Living lab research:
Developing ideas in real contexts, where users, researchers, and stakeholders learn together through practice.
Our Approach
We believe that meaningful inclusion goes beyond usability: it requires shared authorship of technology.
Our approach is guided by:
- Co-production – People are active contributors, not passive users
- Accessibility by design – Inclusive thinking from the very start
- Experimentation – Trying, testing, and learning through making
- Ethics and care – Respecting the rights, dignity, and agency of participants
We embrace uncertainty and creativity, recognising that the best ideas often emerge through collaboration and iteration (and often completely by surprise!)
The RixLivingLab Blog
This blog is a place to share:
- Ongoing projects and prototypes
- Reflections from workshops and collaborations
- Research insights and emerging ideas
- Practical methods for inclusive design and participatory AI
- Stories from the people who shape our work
The blog is intended for researchers, designers, educators, technologists, and anyone interested in building more inclusive futures.
Get Involved
RixLivingLab is always evolving, and we welcome collaboration. Whether you are part of a community organisation, a researcher, a practitioner, or someone with lived experience you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you.