Beyond Metric-Centric Adaptation: Redefining Occupational Heatwave Governance through Living Lab Co-creation

The most critical blind spot in contemporary climate crisis response is the reliance on standardized macro-metrics, which obscure the specific reality of individual suffering. Just as economics uses consumer sentiment to capture household realities and meteorology uses apparent temperature to reflect physiological truths, occupational safety must transition toward integrating perceived risks that exist beyond mere numerical thresholds. This study argues that human perception functions as a high-fidelity biological integration of environmental stressors and conceptualizes it as a Perceptual Trigger: an embodied risk signal with diagnostic and policy relevance. The 2023 fatality of a young logistics worker in Korea illustrates the lethal failure of current systems; while sensors recorded ambient conditions within regulatory thresholds, the system failed to register the worker’s chest tightness—a critical physiological survival signal.

To bridge this gap, a Living Lab for Heatwave Adaptation was implemented in August 2025, engaging 30 port workers from Incheon and 6 technicians from a specialized manufacturer of surface treatment additives as active co-creators. In this study, workers were not treated as mere subjects for data extraction but were empowered as epistemic agents who fundamentally identified and defined hazards within their real-world micro-climates. This study employed the Living Lab methodology as a requisite mechanism to derive Worker Perception Data, which can only be captured within the complex real-world context of the field. Through the systematic qualitative analysis of this co-creation process, the researcher demonstrated that complex heat risks—such as localized radiant heat, engine emissions, and entrapped micro-climates—which are systematically overlooked by standardized sensor arrays, can be effectively rendered into data via worker perception.

The core contribution of this research lies in its translational process: converting Worker Perception Data into systematic risk signals (Information), consolidating them into collectively validated Evidence, and establishing the Policy Grounds for the right to stop work. The researcher proposes a Complementary Governance Model that precisely fills the blind spots of technical sensor monitoring with the acute sensitivity of worker perception data, arguing that this model is a vital mechanism for ensuring site-specific climate adaptation. By framing the datafication of lived experience as an act of Industrial Democracy, this approach serves as an essential interface for connecting grassroots experience with institutional decision-making.