The Living Laboratory is a set of physical spaces within the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (JHMI) Children's Center that allows researchers, IDL faculty, and corporate partners to develop, measure, and prototype the procedures, products or services.

The Living Laboratory includes, but is not limited to, the following sample spaces at JHMI:

• Patient (hospital) rooms
  Examples include treatment rooms, triage space or rehabilitation space
• Family (hospital) rooms
  Examples include waiting rooms, emergent or urgent care space, or family support group meeting space
• Diagnostics
  Examples include magnetic resonance imaging areas, computerized tomography imaging areas, x-ray imaging areas or bariatric imaging areas
• Nursing stations
  Examples include patient ante-rooms, collective and individual nursing space
• Pharmacy
• Research laboratories
  Examples include various laboratory settings, student and faculty research areas, or presentation space

The Innovation and Design Lab seeks to answer the following questions through the research in our Living Lab:

• What will the hospital of the future look like?
• How will it operate?
• What improvements must be made?
• How can the hospital setting or its design be improved to directly enhance patients' health outcomes?
• Who will shepherd the success of new hospital procedures, products, or environments?
• What is the best way to build a hospital of the future?
• What are the most concerning issues, today, of a hospital's daily operations?
• Can how Design improve patient or health care staff safety?

These are just some of the questions generated by the collaboration between JHMI and IDL and ones that create daunting and complex problems that require the use of science, engineering, clinical research, innovation and design to begin the process of building solutions.