Hi My name is Hamed Alavi
and this is a CHI 2021 presentation of a journal paper titled:
The Five Strands of Living Lab: a Literature Study of the Evolution of Living Lab Concepts in HCI
authored by: Denis Lalanne from the University of Fribourg, Yvonne Rogers from University College London, and myself.
The paper is originally published in the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
in 2020, and then invited for a presentation in CHI 2021.
Since the introduction of the iconic Aware Home project in 1999, the notion of “living laboratory”
has been taken up and developed in HCI research. Many of the underpinning assumptions have evolved
over the past two decades in various directions, while the same terminology has been employed.
The broad objective of this contribution is to capture and articulate an organized
understanding of what we talk about when we talk about living lab studies in HCI.
But what is the essential idea of living labs? It has been long established that the physical
and social context in which an activity takes place is likely to be relevant to
how that activity unfolds. In that direction, living laboratories have committed themselves
to the study of complex phenomena in their naturalistic settings and to address problems where they are.
In the paper, we review some of the very early examples of living lab projects.
In HCI, however, living lab ideas reemerged more recently in the 1990s
to respond to the need for researching contextual requirements for designing and evaluating
embodied interactions of ubiquitous and social technologies.
Our focus is on the evolution of Living Lab concepts within Human-Computer Interaction Research.
This contribution distinguishes five different ways of doing Living Lab research in HCI.
It helps us compare various types of living labs, in terms of required resources and main benefits,
and thus help decide which type of living lab would fit the research objectives and the problem at hand.
It also presents prototypical examples for each type of living lab
, and finally, it discusses the role of living lab
and its strands in future HCI research, considering the technological advances
as well as social concerns.
These are accomplished through the methods of discourse analysis applied on 152 SIGCHI and TOCHI articles
published between 1999 to 2019 in which the term living laboratory, or living lab, appears.
A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods
resulted in the distinction of five types of living lab setups which also correspond
to five sets of interdependent methodological advantages. This means that the physical and
technological setup of the living lab can identify its advantages and limitations,
for example in terms of ecological validity, replicability, user engagements, and so forth.
In the HCI literature, we have found five different setups for living labs, and thus
five conceptually distinct strands of living labs, each of which exhibits at least one feature
that makes it the preferred method for certain research objectives.
We label these five strands as "Visited Places", "Instrumented Places", "Instrumented People",
"Lived-in Places", and "Innovation Spaces". A table in the paper summarizes the main
features of each type and compares their advantages and limitations.
In addition to the discussion of each living lab strand in the context of trends such
as the internet of things and the smart agenda, we also bring to the attention the special role
of living lab methods as a middle-ground between controlled experiments and research in the wild,
opening certain possibilities for conducting scientifically replicable
but also ecologically-valid studies. We also highlight that broadening the scope of living
labs entails a new paradigm of user engagement from participation to a form of partnership.