ECOSPACE Newsletter No 5
From AMI@Work Communities Wiki
[edit] Editor’s Corner
Here is our first special issue of the ECOSPACE Newsletter which is dedicated to the topic of Living Lab. As you may remember, all Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) Integrated Projects (IP), namely Collaboration@Rural, CoSpaces, ECOSPACE, LABORANOVA and WearIT@Work projects are implementing a Living Lab approach in order to further explore, experiment and evaluate the concept of user-centred research and innovation.
Within the ECOPSACE project, there were some discussions about the eventual differentiation in between Experience and Application Research (EAR, 2004) and Living Lab. In fact, EAR has been proposed by the ISTAG committee in 2004 as a means of addressing the challenge of creating a human-centred approach to R&D in ICT Ambient Intelligence for supporting integrated research and concurrent assessment of Ambient Intelligence technologies and systems. While the definition of EAR is quite clear, it was almost impossible to identify any published Living Lab definition and, at the same time, there were many different Living Lab visions and understanding....
Inside this special issue you will find several articles introducing the current ECOSPACE Living Lab activities and a brief description of the various on-going Living Labs such as the Viral LL, Frascati and Media Living Labs as well as a temporary one which was operating for about 5 months. For sure, all those Living Labs are there to explore, experiment and evaluate new collaborative concepts and related ICT artefacts within a day-to-day operational environment.
Finally, as this is still the preparatory stage of the ICT WorkProgramme 2009-2010, you will find an article about Living Lab Research which is proposing a Living Lab definition and ICT research challenges that might be of interest to you. There is also an article reporting about the French view on Living Labs that was presented during the ESoCE-NET Industry Forum in Rome on the 3rd of December 2007, by Patrick Schouller, French Ministry of Economy, Finance and Employment, National Representative in the European Community Programs.
As usually, this issue is closing with an announcement of up-coming relevant events such as ICE'2008, to be held in Lisbon from 23 to 25 June 2008, where the CWE'08 event is organised and involved all CWE projects as a special track devoted to both CWE and Living Labs sessions, workshops, training and demonstrations. Don't miss this opportunity to see the latest developments in the areas of CWE and Living Labs!
See you all at the CWE'08 within ICE'2008 in Lisbon!
[edit] Coordinator's Message
At the beginning there was a new buzzword called Living Lab. It was discussed back and forth at various meetings in Brussels, at Conference such as ICE, and in many bilateral meetings. The questions were: What’s in it? Is it different from participatory design?
Now, after 2 more years of research and experience we can answer these questions from various viewpoints. From the methodology viewpoint we have learned how to create, operate and evaluate a living lab. From the design and development viewpoint we have learned, how the close interaction with users in a living lab can inform and guide the design process of collaborative working environments.
Within this special issue of the Ecospace newsletter you will find reports that describe the organization and the first experiences with the Ecospace Living Labs. I hope you’ll enjoy reading these articles and I’m sure that you’ll find answers to questions mentioned above.
During the recent months, ECOSPACE has been participating to the following events:
- Nov. 2007, Summit on Next Generation Collaboration, Stuttgart, Germany
- 03/04. December 2007, ESoCE-NET Industrial Forum
- 11. March 2008', Workshop on Usability Engineering, Duisburg, Germany
- 06. April 2008, CHI 2008 Workshop on Distributed Participatory Design, Florence, Italy
- 20. February, IIR Infrastructure Conference, Bad Homburg, Germany
- 9. April 2008, Netviewer Open Day, Stuttgart, Germany
- 15. April 2008, Web 2.0 and Collaboration, Wiesbaden, Germany
- 17. June 2008, Enterprise Portals, Düsseldorf, Germany
ECOSPACE has (co-)organised / supported the following events:
- 18/19. March 2008, Frascati LL Living Lab Workshop, Frascati, Italy
- 22. April 2008, Viral LL 14Plus Living Lab Workshop, St. Augustin, Germany
[edit] Newsletter special issue dedicated to Living Labs
Introduction
The key objective of the Living Labs in ECOSPACE is to place the new solutions developed into real-life applications and to put technology-driven innovation to the test of practice and spur new demand-driven innovation ideas.
The overall Living Lab approach within Ecospace has the key objective to integrate the lead users through the experience and application research approach towards true co-creation of the project innovations. Within different living lab settings reflecting a broad range of eProfessional working environments, the different ECOSPACE user groups are intensively involved in the innovation cycles.
The objective of innovation co-creation is pursued in ECOSPACE along four sub-objectives:
- Solicit early user ideas and requirements for the project innovations. Even though the basic concepts of ECOSPACE were already developed jointly with the user partners, many more detailed ideas as well as requirements are solicited from joint case studies and observations as well as workshops for idea generation.
- Drive technology and methodology advancement through fast idea push-pull experimentation cycles. The living lab allows users to experience new technology ideas and working methods within their real-life context. Users are thus enabled to understand the usefulness and gaps and in turn to develop new ideas which flow into the next, more advanced cycle.
- Evaluating and validating the solutions in real-life settings. As technologies and new working methods mature, larger field trials in operational projects allow evaluating and validating the broader implications of the innovations in different dimensions like impact on productivity and new organisational forms, or on social networks and work-life-balance
- Extend and deepen methodology of experience and application research. The ECOSPACE consortium brings considerable methodological knowledge as well as facilities for EAR to the project. Nevertheless, the Living Lab work packages will extend the methodological basis and collaborate with other living labs in order to advance European Competence in this field.
Our approach includes the perspective of a Living Lab as a combination of:
- business users willing to use new technology and ways of working in their real-life operational projects
- a technical and physical infrastructure that allows users to access and experience the new technology both within a simulated distributed collaboration setting (for better observation and reflection/discussion) and in their full real-life setting
- a methodology for engaging with the users (including training, experiment designs, workshop designs, evaluation methodologies) for optimal cross-fertilization with the technical work.
ECOSPACE works closely with several members of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), e.g. Frascati LL, Knowledge Workers LL and Viral LL and is an active contributor to the Living Labs Open Innovation Community.
[edit] Viral LL - Virtual Innovation & Research Living Lab
The Virtual Research & Innovation Cooperation Lab (Viral LL) is an interconnected network of platforms & activities aiming at facilitating research, development, innovation and market validation of new cooperation technologies in real-life environments.
Viral LL is a member of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), has contributed to the European Living Labs Roadmap 2007-2010 and is an active member of the Living Labs Open Innovation Community.
[edit] Description of Concept
The Virtual Research & Innovation Cooperation Lab connects the technology support for the European Research & Innovation Community provided by different large cooperation platforms hosted by Fraunhofer FIT with the user-centred methodology framework created and applied within different European and national research projects towards the iterative development of future cooperation support.
The Living Lab is targeting research & innovation in a variety of ways:
- as a cooperation springboard and test-bed for individuals and projects offering an ad-hoc, free and easy to use opportunity to quickly set-up, explore and adopt a mature virtual cooperation environment for distributed collaborative work.
- a platform to research, develop and introduce new cooperation support technologies together with tool developers from leading commercial and non-commercial technology providers.
- to pursue a user-centred development approach and maintaining continuous communication and exchange with the user community.
- as incubator to support new business models like spin-offs around the technology itself, partners integrating cooperation & consulting services for specific domains or Open-Source projects extending functionality.
[edit] References and Track Record
The users and communities currently supported by collaboration technology support of the Virtual Research & Innovation Cooperation Lab comprise among others:
- more than 100.000 users on the public BSCW platform with a strong focus on professional use in research & innovation related areas,
- the Ami@Work Living Labs Open Innovation Community with many hundreds members,
- a large number of individual projects including Public-Private Partnerships.
The public BSCW server within the Living Lab is currently one of the largest public cooperation platforms available in the context of shared workspaces, being in service for more than 10 years and with more than 100.000 users who are using that service for their everyday work. Results of our activities have been documented in a number of milestones and deliverables of different projects, resulted in new technology & service developments and have been published in international conference and journal publications.
[edit] Results, Events & Publications
[edit] Recent Events with participation or co-organisation
- 23-24. April 2007, eProfessionals Living Labs Workshop in collaboration with the CoreLabs SSA and the AMI@Work Living Labs Open Innovation Community, Sankt Augustin, Germany
- 23 May 2007, International Workshop on Virtual Research Environments and Collaborative Work Environments, Edinburgh, Scotland;
- 24. September 2007, Workshop on Realising and Supporting Collaboration in e-Research at ECSCW 2007 - The Tenth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Limerick, Ireland
- 16. October 2007, Living Labs Open Innovation Community interactive day, Brussels, Belgium
- 7. April 2008 Workshop on Distributed Participatory Design at the CHI Conference 2008, Florence, Italy
[edit] Recent Publications
Voss, A., Procter, R., Budweg, S. and W. Prinz (2007). Collaboration in and for e-Research: making the 'O' in virtual organisation work. Proceedings of the German e-Science Conference, Baden-Baden
Budweg, S. (2008) User Involvement and Co-Creation – Exploring Living Labs and Participatory Design in Distributed Contexts. Paper presented at the CHI 2008 Workshop on Distributed Participatory Design, Florence, Italy.
Budweg, S., Stevens, G., Koch, T. & Toerpel, B. (fourthcoming) Medium and Mechanism - Zur Rolle von Koordinatoren in der Praxis. Paper accepted at the Mensch & Computer 2008, Lübeck, Germany.
Budweg, S., Toerpel, B. & Pipek, V. (fourthcoming) Design Communication & Communication Design - Setting up a Virtual Living Lab across Distributed Spheres of Design & Use. Paper accepted at IRIS 2008 - The 31st Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia, Are, Sweden.
[edit] Innovation Communities Living Lab in the Frascati Region and Beyond
Frascati Living Lab is an initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA) located in Frascati very near Rome. It is implemented in close collaboration with regional innovation stakeholders such as innovation agency BIC Lazio, small companies such as Geo-K and Terra2, and universities such as Tor Vergata and Cassino. Since April 2007, ECOSPACE is contributing to the realisation of Frascati Living Lab on basis of our work on eProfessional scenarios and our ECOSPACE collaboration tools supporting communities of professionals. As such this is an example of collaboration and synergies between two Integrated Projects in FP6: ECOSPACE and C@R. The Frascati Living lab activity is part of a series of Living Labs activities within ECOSPACE addressing the role of Professional Communities in research and innovation. Besides the Frascati Living lab we are working on the AMI Communities and Living lab Open Innovation Community, which we see as a European-wide breeding grounds. Through collaboration with the new CO-LLABS project (http://www.ami-communities.eu/wiki/CO-LLABS) we stimulate the emergence of community-based Living Labs enhancing SME innovation in various regions and sectors across Europe. Interestingly, these activities themselves concern Living Labs as strategies for innovation in regions or across Europe, whereas ECOSPACE considers them as Living lab to experiment and validate collaborative working environments.
The objective of the Frascati Living Lab is to catalyze innovation in the region of Lazio through stimulating incubation, innovation and technology transfer. In particular, Frascati Living Lab concerns the exploitation of space technologies and addressing the winery sector but also other sectors such as environment and agriculture. The Living Lab also fulfils a community building role within the Lazio region, as it brings together stakeholders to initiate, discuss and deploy future business, policy and innovation activities. To achieve this objective, Frascati Living Lab has initiated a regional community which is also extending to the Italian Network of Living Labs and European Network of Living Labs. One of the activities of Frascati Living lab so far has been to start experimenting a collaborative platform. This platform supports the development of real life scenarios and collaborative applications of business incubation processes, mainly focusing on transfer of space technologies (including earth observation, navigations and telecommunication and their integration) to non-space sectors, and is offering eProfessional services to support the creation and operation of virtual professional communities.
ESA and ECOSPACE are jointly interested in implementing and experimenting the ECOSPACE suite of collaboration tools and services in combination with the ESA portal to support regional innovation, community development and business incubation initiatives. From ECOSPACE perspective we consider the Frascati Living Lab as an environment which is attractive to validate and further develop our tools addressing eProfessional communities of innovation. Thus, providing support for innovation communities, and in particular supporting business incubation, is the key priority of our work. Very recently we started an initiative with ESA on how to experiment these tools for more specific scenarios such as exploiting space technologies and sensor networks for winery management. And ECOSPACE and ESA, together with BIC Lazio innovation agency, are also starting up a collaboration to extend the Frascati Living Lab to the development of large-scale living lab pilots which should cover, besides the winery sector, other ICT-based innovation domains such as creative media and energy management. Through such pilots we aim to establish a network of Living labs cooperation between Lazio region and other regions across Europe.
The last half year, ECOSPACE and ESA have worked together on creating detailed user scenarios related to business incubation support, which have been discussed with regional stakeholders such as E2Blab and BIC Lazio as well. In parallel, within ECOSPACE we have developed a detailed approach to our collaboration tools as a starting point for the Frascati Living Lab activities and implementing many functionalities of the user scenarios. We have chosen an innovative way of stimulating involvement of regional users and stakeholders, by designing the incubation scenario as a role play, in which various regional stakeholders such as ESA, E2Blab, Geo-K and BIC-Lazio are fulfilling roles.
- Alessandro has initiated a start-up company (Geo-K) which is focused on geographical information systems and remote sensing, has developed a new software product idea to create high resolution maps, but needs support in satellite technology, and also might look to new business partners.
- Giulio works at E2Blab, a business incubation initiative from University of Tor Vergata, is experienced on evaluation of new proposals, manages the Market Place service to bring together business idea partners.
- Roberto, from incubator organization BIC Lazio, supports business start-ups and access to specialist communities.
- Fulvio, an expert in precision farming using satellite technology applications, is from ESA.
During a user meeting in Frascati, on 18-19 March 2008, this scenario was demonstrated, supported by life demos of many collaboration tools, and intensive interaction and discussion emerged resulting in many enhancements. Below are a few snapshots of the scenario.
The scenario focuses on providing support to an incubated company specialized in geographical information systems that already passed the pre-incubation stage. This company and another company agree to develop a software product. During the development process it might be necessary to work jointly on new ideas and discuss them while partners are in different locations or even on the move. It might be useful to tap knowledge and new partners from a community. Additionally it might be useful to search specialized expertise and add new parties to the cooperation, and provide coaching and entrepreneurial support services.
Although the current scenario targets an incubated company, the implications of our approach are far beyond this particular case. Business incubation is a process that specifically targets to support start-ups. However the more general process of incubation covers different phases, from idea inception to projects and mature business opportunities, and it also is to be seen at different levels: at the level of businesses (focus on the start-up process), but also at the level of regions (focus on the innovation policy process) and even European wide (creating a breeding ground). Professional communities play a key role in this vision.
In order to implement this scenario, ECOSPACE has worked on many tools to provide tailored functionalities such as to search and select competencies in a community, to create a group or community including a common workspace, to inform users about documents that become available, and to engage in different ways of synchronous collaboration. We have worked on the integration of such tools and services in order to enable the business incubation support scenario to become realized. Some of the highlights of this research work are the following:
- BSCW shared workspace platform and related services such as blogging, wiki, tagging, task management, expectation awareness, workspace awareness, visualization of networks and other services has been provided by FIT.
- Sharing Support and Teambuilder tools have been worked on by TXT.
- AJAX application to upload documents and inform users has been implemented by University of Murcia.
- AJAX application to upload document and discuss in videoconference has been worked on by UPM.
For the near future we continue our collaboration with ESA and the established Frascati-Lazio user group, organizing user experimentations of this scenario and validating the ECOSPACE tools working jointly with the user community. In parallel through the mentioned CO-LLABS initiative (community-based Living Labs to enhance SME innovation across Europe), we widen the scope of the incubation support scenario to address the regional innovation policies. Here we focusi on large scale initiatives to exploit ICTs for the benefit of economic and social development of Lazio and other regions. This way the ECOSPACE tools and its approach to Living labs will contribute to establishing a European-wide, regional and project level breeding environment to facilitate innovative activities benefiting regions and cities.
ECOSPACE has co-organised, with ESA, the following Frascati Living lab events:
- 3 December 2007, Co-creative innovation in Frascati Living Lab, workshop at ESoCE Net Annual Conference, Rome
- 18/19 March 2008, Frascati Living Lab and Italian Network of Living Labs Workshop, Frascati, Italy
[edit] The Media Living Lab
The Media Living Lab - Publishing workflow with rich media exchange and sharing
Media and publishing industry is nowadays characterized by intensive collaboration of different professionals with very specific competences: authors, graphic designer, editors, publishers and printers or new media creator. They have to exchange and jointly work on very media-rich artifacts, even more so in case of new multi-media applications. A further concern is the management of the workflow among the distributed specialists together with a consistent version management. Currently, the different disciplines use highly specialised applications for their work with little possibility to collaborate virtually or manage the flow of activity and data. The challenge is thus to provide a distributed collaboration environment which allows the individual to use his specialist tool while sharing and collaborating with others through rich media exchange. Virtual project and workflow management should orchestrate the activities and contributions of the different players to achieve a consistent whole.
De Agostini, as a leading publishing company in Europe represented in 33 countries and publishes in 13 different languages, participates in the research part of the ECOSPACE Project providing one of the Living Lab settings. De Agostini states “We are interested in testing and evaluating tools making the collaboration among the distributed teams of independent professionals faster, and more efficient without impairing the creative and artistic abilities”. The reference project that was chosen for the ECOSPACE Living Lab as area for experimentation is the fulfilment of customized petrol companies directories. The department involved is the Cartographic department that produces customized editorial products initiated by the Special Sales department.
This kind of products includes maps of the whole Europe, a total of 32 countries, based on the DeAgostini cartographic material, with the inclusion of specific customer’s data. As customization it gives the localization of all the gas station belonging to the company special pricing network, as well as their address, telephone number, facilities and GPS localization coordinates. The Routes Directory product is composed of an overall section and dedicated country sections. Every national section consists of:
- an overview map showing the cut of the map pages,
- a large scale map, cut into map pages west to east, north to south, showing the locations of petrol stations
- blow-up maps of urban areas showing the locations of petrol stations in that area
- listing pages with addresses and facility overview of all petrol stations in the country
The Database manager incorporates updated information of petrol stations and exports country data in two formats usable on PC-based cartographic system Microstation and Macintosh-based graphic and desktop publishing. The activity of the cartographer are supported by a GIS-System and PC-based cartographic design, using the Microstation CAD-System. Blow-up pages, listings, overview maps, and also overlays on the map for example page numbers and cartographic reference grids are designed on different Macintosh-based systems.
The key actor is the project manager, he has the responsibility of driving the production work process, coordinating the activities, assigning country priorities and specific tasks to the specialists, collecting the customer’s data and managing the draft quality checking cycle keeping relationships with the customer local representatives.
The job of workflow coordination, planning and communication is extremely intensive for the product manager , and also prone especially when the project and progress related information do not reach the people affected by. The product manager has a key role in this process, such that in case of absence, coordination beyond the ongoing work in the different work streams ceases, but also errors become more frequent. Changes in the specifications are easily lost when other people work on the project due to task assignments. A work and information space that allows easy update of status and other project information would simplify the role of the product manager and leverage him on non-productive coordination work. Such space would need to be structured for easy overview and good work support, but somewhat flexible for the specific work at hand. This project was chosen because it is strongly representative for the work typically done in the cartography department, but also for the knowledge work in general that requires combining.
In this scenario De Agostini experimented the TXT Workflow Environment, a web-based and distributed platform for project management, on our cartographic production process. With this tool we were able to support the creation and execution of our complex workflow project and process, enabling the management of the working groups and their allocation to different tasks.
The Project Manager and teams members can dynamically contribute to the execution of the various steps of the workflow, having access to shared documents, supported by collaborative functionalities, such as notes, shared calendar/agenda, chat and videoconference, allowing any kind of asynchronous and synchronous interactions between e-workers.
Currently the system is integrated with:
- The Post@ instant messaging (by JayTown), enabling the possibility for users to chat at any moment of the execution of the collaborative tasks of their workflow.
- The Marte (by UMP) video conferencing system, allowing users to have video sessions linked to their collaborative context.
The Living Lab team was composed of six DeAgostini professionals, two TXT consultants and some representatives of DeAgostini most important customers, like Shell and Exxon. In six month of elapsed time the project figures have been: 1200 proximity maps revised, 2500 sites or petrol station reviewed, more than 150 documents exchanged.
After this initial period of experimentation, the result is very positive regarding the process of data exchange. The definition of a standard and structured data exchange and repository space was judged very positively by the customers, and made it possible to reduce substantially the need to send hard copies. The management of different versions of documents exchanged allowed reducing ambiguity and the need for subsequent iterations especially in the internal production process.
Some problems were highlighted in management of data and in the realization of the artifacts related to the different countries, whose management took place in parallel but with different timing, mainly because the workflow was designed for project management as a whole. Among the future activities is therefore planned a revision of the flow to make it more flexible, splitting activities in subprojects, parallel and asynchronous.
Another problem we encountered was the unavailability, for some customers, to install client software on their workstations due to corporate policies, which is why video conferencing has been tested only internally. In the next phase will be adopted the new software version of Marte that does not require installing client on your own PC, it’s our intention to complete the test of videoconference and desktop sharing functionalities.
Another proposed improvement for the workflow management is the ability to subscribe automatic e-mail alerts to notify the involved users about the update on activities state. From Project manager point of view, it has been revealed the need to be able to keep track of the global progress of the project, in order to verify its compliance with the schedule and progress of the individual activities.
[edit] Shared Workspace and Group Blogging Experimentation within a Temporary Living Lab
The main objective of this temporary Living Lab was to explore the usage of Shared Workspace and Group Blogging (SWGB) and user behavioural patterns in the context of short period projects where most of the stakeholders are collocated on the same geographical site. This temporary Living Lab is an exploratory platform which was set-up within the context of the Virtual Reality Laval Living Lab (VR3L) which is part of the LEVIER Living Lab (member of ENoLL). The SWGB is a collaboration amongst the P&I ENSAM Lab, ISTIA Innovation (university of Angers) and ECOSPACE partners Fraunhofer-FIT and ESoCE-NET.
SWGB experimentation started in October 2007 and terminated in February 2008 (duration of 5 months). It involved a user community of about 60 participants, most of them were Master's degree students from ISTIA Innovation running projects in collaboration with external organisations (either public, academic or industry). After a short initiation on Shared Workspace and Group Blogging, 16 projects were launched and participants were invited to use these technologies on the ECOSPACE platform. All project operations carried out in terms of shared documents and blog entries have been recorded into the platform datalog.
At the end of all projects, several Focus Group Interviews (FGI) have been carried out and collected data file was analysed. However, the comparison between the collected data of the FGI and platform datalog is still on-going. A scientific paper entitled "Shared Workspace and Group Blogging Experimentation within a Living Lab Approach" is reporting about this temporary Living Lab experience. This paper was accepted and will be presented at the CWE'08 within the ICE'2008 Conference.
After the FGI, a group of projects participants were selected for carrying out the exploration and design activities. Group members had already a user experience of several socially oriented web applications as well as collaborative platforms. They have reported their exploration results into a specific document where Mayetic, Sosius, Mind49, Linked In, Flikr, MySpace, FaceBook and Windows Live Messenger represent good examples of what they found useful in terms of technical and social features with an acceptable level of user interface. Altogether, about 17 collaborative web platforms and about 15 social web applications have been experienced and evaluated during the exploration stage.
Several tentative mock-ups including each feature webpage have been designed and discussed among the participants. The above figure is showing an example of the desired main page of the collaborative platform, as designed by users, where most of the expected features are appearing.
Here is the abstract of this paper which will be published into the ICE'2008 conference proceedings and will be available on the ICE proceedings website after the ICE'2008 conference.
"Shared Workspace and Group Blogging Experimentation within a Living Lab Approach"
Authors: Marc Pallot, Simon Richir, Henri Samier
Abstract
For many years, it was assumed that technical features were the most important ingredients to support an effective and efficient collaborative platform. Nowadays, ICT users are creating value in massively populating web applications and online role-playing games with their own activities and related data (i.e. eBay, Amazon, Linked-In, FaceBook, SecondLife, World-of-Warcraft). When looking at the global success of online social networking, online presence and other popular web applications, one may realise the crying users’ need to have collaborative platform supporting also social interactions with dedicated social features instead of purely focusing on technical features. This paper presents an empirical study on the use of both shared workspace and group blogging forming a collaborative platform. This study has been conducted according to the Living Lab user-centred research approach through the use of an exploratory environment as being a real life experiment. The basic idea was to engage a community of users into the collaborative concepts experimentation during their project activities. Important issues like whether the collaborative platform has helped in somehow sharing knowledge and reaching a mutual understanding as well as overcoming various types of collaborative distance are also discussed in this paper.
[edit] Living Labs Research
Article prepared with the contributions of:
- Brigitte Trousse and Bernard Senach, INRIA Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée;
- Simon Richir, P & I Lab, ENSAM Angers
- Boris de Ruyter, Philips Research;
- Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer-FIT;
- Olivier Rerolle and Bernhard Katzy, CETIM
[edit] Introduction
Nowadays, ICT users are creating value in massively populating web applications and online role-playing games with their own activities and related data (i.e. eBay, Amazon, Linked-In, FaceBook, SecondLife, World-of-Warcraft). Over the last 10 years, ICT has dramatically progressed and is more and more embedded into people’s everyday life in such a way that they have at hand more open, powerful and easy to use ICT devices and applications (essentially web-based) than the ones they have at work that are close, limited and complex to use.
Several years ago research studies were demonstrating that the media naturalness of human beings was making almost impossible to create interpersonal relationships beyond the use of natural senses such as sight and touch. Nowadays, when looking at the global success of online social networking and other popular web applications, one realises that almost everyone is willing to become the friend of everyone else around the world and share with them things he likes (i.e. friends, music, movies, books) whatever is the level of media naturalness. Should this phenomenon be considered as a multiplayer online game attracting more fans every day or people willingness to experience something new which is not limited by geographical and time constraints or even a prelude towards collective intelligence Pierre Levy, group behaviour, cognition (i.e. “The Wisdom of Crowds”) and consciousness into the cyberspace?
Would that be possible to imagine people developing new behaviour and senses in the cyberspace to perceive relevant existing information and knowledge resources which would normally be out of reach?
Our knowledge and understanding of this phenomenon is currently quite limited and subject to many possible interpretations. However, the JOHARI Window Model (Luft and Ingham, 1969) is telling us that anyone exposing on the web can potentially receive massive feedback in return. Looking at YouTube and DailyMotion posted videos it becomes obvious that the Internet and web technologies have already significantly unleashed people creativity for the best as well as for the worst. Are the Internet and Web transforming people behaviour? Or are individuals adapting their behaviour to the new opportunities delivered by mobile devices almost permanently connected to the Internet? How is ICT going to evolve in the near future to meet fast evolving citizen/individuals’ needs?
How are we going to better understand this phenomenon? Is this a continuous phenomenon or will the increasing communication and information overload lead to an overkill reaction or a division of our societies between the multi-information-network-tasking users and those who are not capable to deal with the new situation? What could be the most appropriate research approach and environment to investigate these crucial questions? In this article, we are arguing that one possible way to answer the above questions is to adopt a “User-centred Multidisciplinary Research” approach, as being an extension of the Experience and Application Research. This new research approach could be implemented through a range of emerging technologies assembled into User Experience Prototyping Environments as being a new ICT research field enabling users and scientists from complementary disciplines to explore new innovative concepts.
Dr William Bainbridge, head of Human-Centred Computing at the US National Science Foundation, wrote in the journal Science: “Online worlds offer great potential to social scientists because they overcome some of the problems these researchers encounter when gathering subjects in the real world, For instance, social scientists often face problems finding subjects fast enough or securing funds to carry out the research. The popularity of online worlds such as Second Life and World-of-Warcraft meant there was a ready pool of subjects that could be recruited over long periods of time for little cost. The game worlds also gather huge amounts of data about what players do that could easily be analysed by social scientists.” Human-centred computing appears to be a potential EAR/Living Lab related ICT research domain, especially because it is an emerging multidisciplinary research field devoted to computing and computational artefacts addressing human aspects. It involves researchers from different disciplines such as computer science, sociology, psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, science and technology studies, and industrial design. This is an opportunity towards a new innovative ICT field which can help to introduce a more creative and intuitive style into research while at the same time bringing science closer to the citizens through the engagement of EU wide communities of users.
[edit] EAR and Living Labs
Experience and Application Research (EAR) has been proposed by the ISTAG committee in 2004 as a means of addressing the challenge of creating a human-centred approach to R&D in ICT Ambient Intelligence for supporting integrated research and concurrent assessment of Ambient Intelligence technologies and systems. EAR involves research, development and design by, with and for users. In fact, ISTAG suggested that Ambient Intelligence research increasingly needs “to allow people to live in their own future” in order to bring that research closer to the needs of citizens and businesses. EAR technologies should enable prototyping of novel interaction concepts while resembling natural environments of use. These ‘experience prototyping’ environments should also be equipped with observation technologies that can capture and analyse the behaviour of people that interact with the experience prototypes.
Several EU research projects, funded under the 6th Framework Programme ( Collaboration@Rural, CoSpaces, ECOSPACE, LABORANOVA and WearIT@Work), have implemented a User-centred Research approach, named either “Experience and Application Research” (EAR) or “Living Lab”, in order to involve end-users at the earlier stage of the R&D process. Following this EAR or Living Lab approach, end-users are engaged into User Experience Prototyping Environments where scientists from complementary disciplines are expected, on the one hand, to reach a higher level of understanding of occurring phenomena (such as the one described above) and on the other hand, to create new concepts that will lead to radical innovations in terms of both ICT products and/or services.
Beside the fact that a Living Lab is gathering a network of complementary organisations and stakeholders involved in the R&D process in combining technology push and application pull, the main concept is to turn users, from traditionally being considered as a problem, into a value. There are currently 51 Living Labs across the EU that are members of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL). According to the nature and scope of each Living Lab, different scientific disciplines might be represented. For example, a City driven Living Lab could be more orientated towards Social sciences, Humanities, Computer science and policy development (i.e. e-government, e-democracy) and Environmental sciences as well as Energy for the benefit of citizens while a Regional Competitiveness Cluster driven Living Lab is more orientated towards Computer science, Biomedical and Life sciences, Physics in aeronautics as well as Engineering for the benefit of regional business activities.
In the past, a great guy, named Mason Cooley, said "Every path to a new understanding begins in confusion.", which explains why people may have difficulties in perceiving the differences between testbed and Living Lab. Someone else, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, famous for his Nobel prize said "Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought" which is exactly where Living Lab is standing now in arguing that building up User Experience Prototyping for exploring new innovative concepts and better understanding users’ behaviour and their real need is radically different than building-up testbed for testing functionalities against requirements.
An American Astronomer, Writer and Scientist, Carl Sagan, said “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”, which makes sense for people willing to get more powerful observation instruments to be lightening something still in the darkness waiting to be discovered. This is exactly what is needed for EAR/Living Lab but instead of lightening space objects, the new observation instruments (i.e. new ICT sensors) should combine multiple heterogeneous data streams for lightening new innovative concepts and related users’ behaviour. This will result into a considerable increase of collected data amount and complexity. However, it is more than coping with massive amount of data as there is also a need for multidisciplinary research combining human expertise and knowledge between Domain scientists and ICT scientists for being able to understand and interpret the data from different perspectives.
Why is it vital to have a User-centred Multidisciplinary Research Approach?
Recent research studies shows that 70% to 80% of new product and service development that fails does so not for lack of advanced technology but because of a failure to understand real users’ need. Beside those studies there are other examples such as this dramatic aircraft crash which led to the conclusion, after analysing all elements that the crash was mainly due to the change of analogical displays in the cockpit by numerical ones which has turned into a miss-interpretation of parameters by the pilot during a stressful situation. Since this time, there is a higher motivation to involve users at the earlier stage of the R&D process in order to better understand the relationship between new innovative concepts and related users’ behaviour within specific situations as well as potential cognitive workload in interpreting received signals. A another good illustration of the need to take into account users at the earlier stage of the R&D process concerns the place of trust in man machine communication. The previous example of aircraft accident is an example of bad mapping between human tasks/goals and system design. The user interface is ill-designed and it is also a matter of task allocation based on confidence: the pilot trusts that the technical system will reach the expected performance and will give alert in case of problems. Beyond the trust in a technical system, the web has brought another level of conscience as the devices are used to connect people for share activities. In many web applications, it is the case: for instance in commercial transactions (e-commerce) or in car-sharing. Clearly, to deal with these situations and support relationships, it is necessary to understand trust building mechanisms "in the real life". In fact, if a technical system is intended to support social relations, it has to provide more than good response time, clear user interface and optimized code. It has to provide hints and clues that the other people on line will follow implicit rules and will behave as it is expected by other stakeholders of an interaction situation.
One can also imagine that User-centred Multidisciplinary Research Approach through the development of specific User Experience Prototyping Environments (such as virtual/mixed reality environments) could also be used for the treatment of Phobia where patients and psychologists are immersed together into a simulated environment reproducing stressful situations. This kind of Experience Environments could also be used to design social friendly public spaces in order to reduce the level of stress and increase the ambiance friendliness.
The Multidisciplinary nature of a User-centred Research approach
Within a User-centred Research approach, several disciplines such as Computer science, Ergonomics, Economics, Cognitive, Psychology, Social sciences, Environmental sciences, Humanities and Life sciences are necessary for designing and building-up User Experience Prototype environments, exploring new concepts and related artefacts, making proper observations and evaluation on different aspects according to the context of the specific research projects. The "observed end-users" are not necessarily immersed individually but could also be immersed as a group or even as a community which is leading to richer observations and greater quantity of collected data which are increasing the reliability of the resulting analysis.
[edit] Living Lab, a Definition
A Living Lab is a new research paradigm integrating both:
- a user centred multidisciplinary research approach
- a user community driven innovation based on real life experiments
It is intended to:
- increase the understanding of occurring phenomena
- explore and evaluate new concepts and related ICT artefacts
- confront new ideas, concepts and related ICT artefacts with users' value model
- enable re-usable experiments (i.e. dataset, research protocols and methods,..)
- result in more accurate and reliable products and services
- speed-up concepts to market and promote viral adoption
- contribute to initiate potential lead markets
- contribute to bring science and innovation closer to the citizen
(1) Living Lab is more than experimental facility as its philosophy is to turn users, from being traditionally considered as a problem, into value creation!
[edit] Living Labs Research Challenges
There are current gaps of different natures related to both Research Infrastructure (RI) and ICT Research and Technology Development (RTD).
EAR or Living Labs Research Infrastructure
There is a need for a specific Living Lab RI at the European level providing access to the Science community to the harmonised user-centred research and innovation services (best practices, methods, tools and platforms) supporting the early involvement of users within the R&D process. This is relevant to the Capacities programme of the DG Research and more specifically addressing the Research Infrastructure WorkProgramme.
User Experience Prototyping Environments
There is also a need to carry on research dedicated to the development of specific User Experience Prototyping Environments designed to experience new ICT paradigms (i.e. Ambient Intelligence, Web2.0, Web3.0, Perceptics), innovative concepts and related artefacts that will lead into innovative ICT based products and/or services. This is relevant to the ICT Work programme but not yet addressed by one of the current objectives. There is another need for an agreed catalogue or library or even handbook of research methods that serves both as a resource and on the same hand as a standardisation media to harmonise and to compare experimental research. Such a library can be extended by a set of use case to inform the experimentation within the community. This kind of ICT based research environment would be valuable to most of the ICT research fields as it enables the systematisation of the User-centred Research approach and access to a wider scope of collected usage data across the EU.
ICT RDT need: User Experience Prototyping Environments
While usability tests have already been successfully implemented within the downstream side of the R&D process, very few has been done so far regarding the earlier involvement of end-users within the upstream side of the R&D process. This is especially true during the exploration of new innovative concepts and observation of related users’ behaviour. It is important to note that as user experience widens the concept of usability (see for instance: Norman 1998, 2004, 2007; Garett , 2002). User experience methods to assess user experience have to tackle wider dimensions as done by traditional usability evaluation methods. Methodologies for studying user experience are, admittedly, still in their infancy, although many ingredients are already available. Contrary to assessment methods several approaches try to understand experiences and their context of origin. Examples are cultural probes (Gaver et al 1999; 2004) which are collections of materials that are designed to provoke inspirational responses from people in diverse communities or the experience sampling method (Csikszentmihalyi et al 1987; 1997). This is based on the repeated assessment of individual or group behaviour and experience in the daily context. Other methods refer to experience prototyping to simulate experiences if different situations or idea generation methods for specific experiences.
Various scientific communities are interested in better understanding the behaviour of individual users as well as group or community of users on the internet, notably Human Computer Interaction research community (HCI), Social sciences and Data mining which provides tools to process massive and evolving data set. While there is such a common interest, very little effort has been done to share resources, to combine point of views, and in most cases each discipline simply ignores the others. The new approach of "User Experience" encompasses all aspects of end-users’ interactions, widen the scope of previous research fields and engages researchers from different disciplines to create new Meta-heuristic (i.e. genetic algorithms, ant colony algorithm, differential evolution algorithm) based analysis tools.
A User Experience Prototyping Environment is a kind of exploration-of-concepts/proof-of-concept/adoption-of-concepts platform which is composed of three distinctive parts:
- Designing user experience prototypes around new innovative concepts to be explored;
- Immersing individual or group of users into specific situations for designing and experiencing new innovative concepts;
- Evaluating usage, impact and potential adoption: Evaluate the cognitive workload level of individuals and groups with a proposed concept design to be explored. Visualising combined heterogeneous collected data and making multidisciplinary observations on the usage of concepts.
This kind of environment encompasses the fields of human factors, human-computer interaction, socio-emotional interaction, cognitive psychology, cognitive ergonomic, computer science, artificial intelligence and other related fields. As in the case of Socio-Cognitive or Cognitive Engineering, users and observed usages are considered as being the central drivers for new innovative concept design and exploration.
ICT RTD should provide the following elements:
The main objective is to researching emerging models, methods and tools coming from new scientific and technological derived paradigms to increase the quality of User Experience and Observation (quantity as well as quality of collected data) of new innovative concepts leading to new innovative ICT products and/or services.
1. New models
Research and develop new models incorporating socio-cognitive, cognitive ergonomic, socio-emotional and economic aspects that will enable new usage analysis methods. Models have to be developed from the perspective of meta-systemic knowledge and socio-cognitive values involved in the management of large complex heterogeneous intelligent socio-technical systems integrating human, technological and environmental elements.
- Scenario and Session Models: Context, user-centred sessions, Defining interaction steps between users and their experience environment.
- User Model: Collecting Usage Data/Experience, Pre-processing Data for collective usage data, Clustering users and concepts, individual and collective behavioural aspects, user or session profiling, Mining online social and concept networks especially for adaptive tools.
- Cooperation Model: networks, patterns, and forms of cooperation.
- Trust Model: Evaluation criteria, mining of users interactions through different channels and implication on interpersonal relationships.
- Forecast Model: Measure Internet browsing behaviour, cognitive overload and particularly switching costs and searching costs for users (i.e. user learning costs).
2. New techniques/methods
To go further in these fields, that are addressing growing data set, refining users or network modelling, new multidisciplinary methods articulating usage mining approach and human factors expertise are required. Researchers will have to improve their clustering techniques and use more advanced techniques to process usage data streams. These different techniques are studied by researchers from the Data Mining/KDD community, though a new specific field has emerged, namely Web Usage Mining (WUM):
- Data acquisition methods: synchronizing heterogeneous data, cognitive radio, based on new instruments and able to get structured data inside collective dynamic situations.
- Data Mining and Benchmarking methods: some ICT research could be very relevant for User Experience context and should be validated in this context: for example usage data is a kind of very large data sets and could be a good context of validating algorithms in mining data streams. Another example, contrary to document mining field where there is a lot of benchmarking initiatives (challenge TREC, INEX offering large documents collection - XML or not), it is needed to do the same for usage mining communities.
- Knowledge Elicitation/Discovery and Evaluation methods: The most crucial aspect for ICT research is to formulate research ICT problems inside the EAR context. Indeed some very crucial notions in EAR such as "trust", "social networks", "usage" ... should be included in the formulation itself of the ICT research problems with a clear description of the way to validate such researches. Multi-disciplinary researches with a pragmatic, cognitive and socio-cognitive approach are of a crucial importance nowadays. For example: - coupling objective data (logs, usage traces) with subjective data (questionnaires) to answer questions such as "how to measure the successful and failed user sessions "how to measure trust in usage data according to a given application ? " - taking into account multiple points of views in a Knowledge Discovery process from Databases ( KDD), process which is usually decomposed in three steps: pre-processing, mining and interpretation/ validation. Cognitive and socio-cognitive approach are crucial in the pre-processing of usage data in terms of data cleaning, data structuring as they help to understand what are the useful analysis units, construction of new aggregated variables as well as variables that will be related to the notion of trust, selection of relevant variables or relevant distances for the mining step.... There is the same need for the interpretation step.
- User Experience research methods: constituting a catalogue of research methods that could be combined for being able to understand and interpret phenomenon from different perspectives. It should go beyond the current socio-cognitive and related methods such as Applied Cognitive Task Analysis, Cognitive Function Model, Cognitively Oriented Task Analysis, Interacting Cognitive Subsystems, Unstructured and Structured Interviews, Group Interview, Walk-through, Cognitive Walk-through, Talk-through, Formal Usability Studies, Ergonomics Checklists, Situated and Distributed Cognition, not mentioning Ethnographic research.
3. New tools
- User Experience modelling tools (i.e. User dynamic profiling, behavioural and trust profiling)
- Virtual/ Mixed User Experience prototyping tools: Prototyping of new participatory communication/collaboration paradigms often involving very targeted and selected communities, addressing small or large groups of users such as team or community, providing the appropriate community environment beyond classic 2D based for supporting user group experience in a 3D immersion space. The resulting elements will constitute an Experience Environment that will be applicable in most of user group experience situation. These virtual worlds may look primitive still, but citizens are already living in an enriched world where people interactions with companies, banks, institutions, universities, cities and public services, are no longer just based on a physical communication paradigm. Instead they have become highly mediated by technologies. This will continue to grow. People interactions will not only become more mobile but also more involving, more three-dimensional, and more experiential.
- Simulated User Experience prototyping tools: Prototyping of new interaction paradigms through simulated environments to handle extended multidisciplinary simulations with multi-source acquisition for supporting user group experience into a shared simulated space instead of the traditional individual user experience space. Researchers can be getting insights into real life by studying what people do in virtual worlds, suggesting that virtual worlds could help scientists studying ideas of government and even concepts of self, while other researchers are looking at how behaviour peculiar to online worlds differs from that in real life.
- Usage Analysis tools: New analysis tools based on a more global approach of the user tasks both for a better ICT research or ICT based services evaluation and for improving the understanding of User Experience. Widen the scope of previous research fields and engages researchers from different disciplines to create new Meta-heuristic based analysis tools.
- Living Lab out of the box tools that enable the set-up of an experiment anyplace on demand. Experimentation in an unconventional digital environment as Virtual laboratories to better understand human behaviour.
4. New Infrastructure Paradigms
- Researching new User-centred/Participatory Infrastructure Paradigms where users are setting up and maintaining their own infrastructures (e.g. Wifi networks, Web communities) which requires a fundamental different design of the infrastructures, their user interfaces, operations and maintenance.
- Experiment new User-centred/Participatory Infrastructure Prototypes which means that said paradigmatically new user-centred infrastructures have to be conceived, engineered, built technically tested and validated in a user participatory approach.
References
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Larson, R. (1997). Validity and reliability of the Experience Sampling Method, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 175. 526-536
- Csikszentmihalyi, M., Larson, R. and Prescott, S. (1987). The ecology of adolescent activity and experience, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 6. 281-294
- Garett, J (2002). The element of user experience, Paperback
- Gaver, B., Dunne, T. and Pacenti, E. (1999). Design: Cultural probes, interactions, 6 (1). 21-29
- Gaver, W.W., Boucher, A., Pennington, S. and Walker, B. (2004). Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty.
- Luft, Joseph, (1969). "Of Human Interaction", Palo Alto, CA: National Press.
- Norman , D. (1998). The Invisible Computer, Why Good Products Can Fail, the Personal Computer Is So Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution, Cambridge MA, MIT Press
- Norman , D. (2004). Emotional Design, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Design>. : why we love (or hate) everyday things, NY : Basic Books.
- Norman , D. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Design>(2007). The Design of Future Things <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Design_of_Future_Things&action=edit&redlink=1>, Basic Books
Other links regarding User Experience:
[edit] Past Events
[edit] ESoCE-NET Industrial Forum, Rome, 3 December 2007
On the 3rd of December 2007, the ESOCE-Net annual Industrial Forum, whose main theme was "Co-creative Innovation in Service-Product Development", was traditionally composed of a morning plenary session and workshop sessions in the afternoon. It gathered together about 100 attendees to further discuss about co-creative innovation and Living Labs especially during the breaks as the program was very dense. It is now a well-established tradition to have every single year this annual Industrial Forum in Rome, during the first Monday of December.
After the introduction speeches about "Concurrent Innovation – Vision 2020" by Roberto Santoro, ESoCE-NET President, and "Filas Innovation Agency" by Stefano Turi, Filas, Lazio, this year's forum was featuring two invited keynote presentations:
- "French Pole of Competitiveness - Living Labs - What's New?" by Patrick Schouller, Ministry of Economy, Finance and Employment, General Directorate for Enterprises, National Representative in the European Community Programs, France
- "Helsinki Living Lab" by Eero Holstila, Director of Economic Development of the City of Helsinki, Finland
In his presentation, Patrick Schouller introduced the framework of the main funding bodies supporting the French R&D across the typology of Non cooperative research, Cooperative research Public–Private partnership, and Public Research. Secondly, he introduced the famous French Competitiveness Clusters (Pôles de Compétitivité) as being an instrument to instigate a new industrial policy, combining local areas, innovation and industry more effectively than in the past. Competitiveness Clusters are bringing together the industrial, scientific and academic players in a given local area to form competitiveness clusters.
He presented a map of the 71 French competitiveness Clusters where French Living Labs are mentioned.
Doing a brief recap, he commented the interesting fact that it was still necessary to add a more user-centric approach as in the Living Lab concept. Then, he pointed out that several Living Labs were already present in France which emerged within the corresponding regional competitiveness Clusters (see the map) and making the statement that the Living Labs "epidemic" is growing while, surprisingly, there is actually no national pressure on Competitiveness Clusters to do so.
Addressing the French view about Living Labs, he told the audience that it could be one of the solutions to:
- Increase the competitiveness of the European industry.
- Provide more accurate products and services for citizen.
- Bring closer science to citizen.
- Attract more students to scientific disciplines.
- Increase the number of researchers in Europe.
- Make Europe more attractive for all kinds of Living Labs stakeholders.
- Help European players, especially SMEs, at the export level.
However, he continued the presentation of the French view in pointing out the following current concerns:
- What about the governance of Living labs?
- What about the management of IPR?
- What about the nature of action, Living Labs are not necessarily adapted to all type of activities as the Living Lab concept appears to be more obvious for IT products and services than for transportation (i.e. TGV, Airbus)
- What could be the business model sustaining Living Labs?
- Living Labs appear to be more adapted to relatively short time-to-market projects
- Not necessarily adapted to all size of industrial organisations
- What is the limit? How many Living Labs are necessary?
- What about the sustainability aspects (Cf. Network of Excellence sustainability difficulties)
- Stakeholders are still missing in the Living Lab concept (i.e. Regulatory Function, Venture Capitalist)
He concluded the presentation of the French view in saying that while there is currently a high interest in France, more inquiry and investigation on the existing Living Labs are necessary.
Finally, in his presentation there was a concluding slide entitled "What Next?" that the captivated audience was very much expecting. He introduced the central theme of the EU French presidency as being "Science for the benefit of Society" which, he said, "fits remarkably well with the paradigm of Living Labs. However Degree of awareness of the Living Lab concept should be increased in some countries (including France and other EU South and South-East countries) in order to have a complete and harmonious repartition of Living Labs over the European Union."
He also mentioned that "better communication on the existing European Network of Living Labs is required as well as an increased awareness of the EC efforts in the field to boost further candidatures.” He made the following conclusion: “The European Network of Living Labs has been launched during the Finnish presidency. There was no further extension of the ENoLL during the German's one while there was an acceleration during the Portuguese's one with a growing ENoLL membership up to 51 Living Labs. We are currently expecting the Slovene action and decision while already exploring the different ways to do something during the French presidency."
Have a look at the concurrent innovation poll
Industry Forum’07 Programme and Presentations are available here
Emerging Cities
Wiki City Rome Notte Bianca 8 September 2007
WikiCity Rome Map
Integrated Concurrent Innovation (ICE)
ESoCE-NET Vision of ICE Virtual Living Lab
[edit] Up-coming Events
[edit] ICE'2008 and CWE'08, Lisbon, Portugal, June 23-25 2008
The Collaborative Working Environments (CWE) 2008 event will be held at the ICE'2008 conference in Lisbon, from 23 to 25 June 2008, as CWE track during the 3 days.
CWE'08 is gathering together all CWE projects and is featuring sessions with the presentation of about 40 scientific papers, workshops, training and demonstrations.
CWE'08 is also featuring several sessions and workshops dedicated to Living Labs. One of them is an important Living Labs feedback report from all CWE IP projects in terms of current status, lessons learned, gaps and research challenges.
The "CWE08 Track Description" is here in the wiki pages where special sessions, workshops and demonstrations have a more detailled description.
The "ICE2008 Final Programme" including the CWE track is now available for downloading (see all provided links below) and feel free to disseminate it to your colleagues and contacts that could be interested to join this valuable event.
Here are below the link to the full 3 days programme and links for each day programme:
- PDF Final 3 days Programme
- PDF Monday programme
- PDF Tuesday programme
- PDF Wednesday programme
- PDF Keynote speakers
For sure, in case you have not done your conference registration already, then you can get the conference registration form on the ICE conference website
Looking forward to welcoming you at CWE'08 within ICE'2008.
[edit] CSCW'08, San Diego, California, USA, November 8-12 2008
Published by:
ECOSPACE Newsletter is published by: ECOSPACE Consortium
Editorial Coordinator: Marc Pallot, ESoCE-NET
Editorial Board: Wolfgang Prinz, Antonio Marquès, Marc Pallot
ECOSPACE Newsletter is supported by: European Commission FP6-IST-5 35208, ECOSPACE Integrated Project
