Full Circle Associates

Configuring Living Labs for a “Thick” Understanding of Innovation
(Joe Pierson, Bram Lievens & Pieter Ballon)

Theoretical background in sociology, media and communications studies
Perspective: Social shaping of Technology (SST) – an approach that investigates the way economic and social factors have shaped the rate of innovation, the form of technology and the outcomes of technological change for different groups in society

Focus: user research on ICT

Methods:
Stems from challenge of setting up a large-scale environment where people could be examined in their own settings. Living Labs.

e-Paper Project
Based on combination of e-link technology and handheld. Involves business and academic partners. Belgacom, Phillips, Financial newspaper and two advertising. Two academic partners.

How can a living lab setting based on ethnographic principles be used to understand users in their settings? Test concepts, technologies and services in early stages of innovation – pre development phase. Aimed at facilitating and validating design, vs. test beds and market pilots. Characteristics are the use of natural user environment, enabling ethnographic research and multiple methods.

Phases of the living lab cycle.

Configuration:
Contextualization
- hovering phase – suck up as much of the context as we can. Assemble background info for next steps. Each project has a scope that needs investigation. This project was on mobile consumption of news. How people are moving, which kinds of news they consume, etc.
- technological and socio-economic scanning – what is possible, what is emerging with technology and socio-economic – how people are using. I.E. RSS feeds as a new method that can be incorporated as a feedstream in test device.
- Picking – Purposeful sampling, maximum variation (hierarchical values) – done carefully. Phenomenal variation, theoretical variation. Clarity around who and what. This is charted out to look at cross issues. Helps for recruitment.
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Concretization
- Fingerprinting – identifying the test users. Initial measurement, in depth profile of users. Serves as reference point. Fixed components like demographic and ICT adoption and usage issues, and variable components like reading profile of newspapers and magazines.
- Simultaneous vs. phased introduction choice
Implementation
- Spotting and digging in user behavior. Product is embedded in real lives of test users. Direct analysis facilitated by technological monitoring of product, ethnographic methods (observation, etc0 and indirect analysis – focus group interviews, in depth interviews, self-reporting techniques.

Feedback
- everything comes together, feedback to developers and designers, insights in existing and new contexts
- Ex post measurements (identifying changes, survey methods)
- Technological recommendations – user profiles and user patterns, iterative process

Value of this approach for industry
ON two levels.

First, the level of an individual. For individual company for structuring the front end. The multi-methodological approach allows a triangulation of methods for specific outcomes. Can look at sociality – unpredictable uses, work home and on the road.

For a cluster of companies it is useful in pre-competitive setting. Avoid systemic failures and support systemic innovation.

Conclusion: alternative way of studying. Methodological framework (vs. specific guidelines). Narrow down to methods based on early framework. User centered to people centered. Social framing uncontrollable dynamics in every day life. Mutual shaping innovation processes – a bridge. Technology influences social and visa versa. Hope to bridge between sociological studies and technological design.

Categories: EPIC2005, innovation