Summary
Living labs presents a research methodology for sensing, prototyping, evaluating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts. Living Lab is aiming to create and evaluate in collaborative multi-contextual empirical real-world environment.
Description
Researchers study the behaviour of users in naturalistic living environments to better understand how to create technologies that respond to and respect the complexity of life.
Strengths
User experience evaluation the real life context, with specific target users; Long-term evaluation of user experiences (over time, changes)
Weaknesses
Resource and time intensive: community building, hosting needed to keep people motivated and engaged on a long-term; needs to be combined with other methods in the field
References describing the method
Example References: (1) Abowd, G. D., Atkeson, C. G., Bobick, A. E., Essa, I. A., MacIntyre, B., Mynatt, E. D., and Starner,
T. E. (2000). Living laboratories: The future computing environments group at the georgia
institute of technology. In CHI ’00 Conference Proceedings: Human Factors In Computing
Systems. (2) Niitamo, V.-P., Kulkki, S., Eriksson, M., and Hribernik, K. A. (2006). State-of-the-art and good
practice in the field. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising:
Innovative Products and Services through Collaborative Networks.