Living Labs

The last 10 year we have created much more technology than we are using today. We have invested enormous amounts of money in mobile broadband structures and what is the most important mobile application today: texting (or txtspk), the mobile application that is the most basic in mobile technology. We are investing heavily into fiber to the home and what are people watching: low res video’s on Youtube. And they (we?) are loving it.
For many research projects the user was not a part of the equation. Technology had it’s own goal: more broadband, more mobile, more functions: more is good. And as all unix users know: more is less…
Today I had a conversation with people from CETIM (Bernhard Katzy, Benoit Dutilleul and Jean-Marc Verlinden) about Living Labs. For technology research it is more and more important to get out into the field.. Because the social aspects and user experience are the next frontier to take we need to do the research in close contact with the users. A new version of ADSL can be developed in the lab, a Wiki can only be created through a constant iteration with users. The number of possible functions are many but only a few will catch on with users. We can not use a stub for the user like we do in software development to test functions.
Living Labs is a (bit hyped) term used for large scale, in situ testing, of new developments. Tribler is an example where data is collected from the users of this bittorrent client to understand why and how people use this software. Google Mail is even an example because of the constant measurement and adaptation of the software to the way people are using it. CETIM is involved in the “Knowledge Workers Living Lab” And Telematica Instituut is involved in the “Freeband Experience Lab”.
A lot of these labs in Europe are starting to cooperate together. Many have their own expertise and infrastructures so working together leads to better possibilities for user focused research and new paths to (open)innovation. As CETIM and Telematica Instituut we are looking into he possibilities to work together these issues. Maybe you will soon be part of this great living lab we call earth …

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