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Taking as a starting point the implementation of the Normandy Hydrogen Plan, this article reviews the modalities of citizen participation in the definition of the energy transition trajectory made necessary by climate change. It then focuses on an original initiative aimed at broadening the public’s power of experimentation: the implementation of a living lab dedicated to the place of hydrogen in the transition. Usually reserved for innovation, this methodology was applied in a broader perspective of participatory democracy. Heavily invested by the private and public sectors, the living lab was partly instrumentalized in a perspective of social acceptance by the invited experts and was transformed into a sphere of diffusion of institutional initiatives. The prototypes elaborated by the participants in this environment have finally sidestepped the political dimension of the transition when those of the hydrogen tinkerers seem to be more capable of bringing it out.