Sampling Contextual Experiences in Living Lab projects: Experience Kit as a context aware experience sampling tool

BACKGROUND/HISTORY AND CONTEXT OF THE WORKSHOP
Living Lab researchers face the challenge of measuring behavior in natural environments in an efficient manner. This is especially important when they want to evaluate technology in situ and over long stretches of time. This context aware Living Lab research will require supporting tools and strategies.
The current methods to capture the naturalistic setting require a tremendous amount of resources if the researcher wants to capture multiple snapshots of the context in which the interaction with technology takes place. Currently there are 5 types of methods being used by Living lab practitioners to evaluate interactions in the field. Interviews are performed individually or in group and are effective for gathering general information on the users tasks. Self report studies or recall surveys that ask a user to assess their behavior in a naturalistic context. Direct observation, where a researcher follows the user around and literally observes what he or she is doing, does not suffer from selective and recall bias like interviews and surveys do, but it is very costly because it is time-consuming and disruptive if the natural setting is a home setting for example. To minimize the selective and recall bias, sometimes diaries are used as well.
The users are then asked to write down what they do during the day as they are doing it or at certain time intervals. This is more burdensome for the user itself. Experience sampling is a form of diary method, where users are prompted to self-report diary entries. ESM (=experience sampling) is less susceptible to subject recall errors than other self-report feedback elicitation methods, but the primary drawback to ESM is the interruption created by the sampling itself. ESM disrupts the user’s activity, requiring the user to stop the current activity and answer questions. Especially because often high sampling rates are used to discover activities of interest which can become burdensome for the user and subject-selection bias. (Intille et al, 2003).
This clearly shows that Living Lab researchers lack a powerful and economical assessment tool. In response to this, we have been looking at the potential of context aware experience sampling. This technique tries to remove the burden of experience sampling with the user, by triggering/prompting question based on the context in which the user is. In addition to extended data collection capabilities, this methodology also provides one fundamentally new type of functionality: context-aware experience sampling.
This permits researchers to acquire feedback from users only in particular situations that are detected by sensors connected to a mobile computing device or placed in the environment. In other words, the context (location, time, event, biosensor data) can trigger the sampling. This workshop will introduce CAES to living lab practitioners as well as showcase a tool that can support them in applying this methodology.
MAIN AIM / OBJECTIVE
This workshop will have two main goals: Inform the community on context aware experience sampling, its potential for research projects and introduction to the tool experience kit. Detect which elements of context are important to measure/sense via such a tool for living lab researchers, so the future roadmap of experience kit can be determined and interesting contextual sensors can be integrated in the tool.
EXPECTED OUTCOMES
The workshop will on the one hand make practitioners more aware of the elements they have to take into consideration when setting up a test with users. On the other hand the output of the workshop will provide us with a set of (new) features that can be integrated in the future roadmap of our experience kit tool. ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
BRIEF OUTLINE / METHODOLOGY
Digital services can help the living lab practitioners in their project to track experiences via sampling in a more systematic way. To support Living Lab practitioners in using these digital services, imec is developing Experience kit. In this workshop, we want to present the recent developments, as well as explore and discuss the ways in which Living Lab processes can be supported through such an evaluation of experience with support of a new platform and app Experience kit. What are the pitfalls and solutions in the execution? The workshop will apply co-design methods to collect the requirements of the Living Lab community, to better tune Experience kit to needs of the Living Lab practitioners.
Workshop Facilitators
Andoni Lombide Carreton
IT architect

Andoni Lombide Carreton
IT architectAndoni is an IT architect in IMEC’s prototyping team. He has done architecture and software engineering work for both industrial companies and research projects, with a focus on distributed real-time and streaming systems, such as IoT and reactive architectures. Before making the switch to industry, he worked as researcher and as a lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and obtained a PhD in Computer Science on programming language support for distributed event-driven computing in 2011.
Lynn Coorevits
Innovation Manager

Lynn Coorevits
Innovation ManagerLynn Coorevits is an Innovation Manager at IMEC.livinglabs, where she is responsible for tools and methodologies that improve testing in living labs. She is also affiliated to the IMEC-mict-ugent department Ghent University in Belgium as a Senior User Researcher. She holds master degrees in Psychology and Marketing Analysis from Ghent University and has over 10 years of experience in innovation research and consultancy ranging from the financial to the social industry. She was also involved in projects that include the Internet of Things such as the City of Things initiative in Antwerp. Her main interests are in the domain of user experience research and more specifically the optimization of tools and techniques for contextual inquiry via sensors.
Olivier Rits
Program Manager

Olivier Rits
Program ManagerOlivier Rits graduated as Engineer Applied Physics at Ghent University and started a research project on optical interconnects inside digital systems. After that he joined Alcatel-Lucent as business developer, focusing on defining the go2market strategy and developing the business first for networking technology broadly and later with focus on innovative applications in IoT. In 2012 he was part of the winning Alcatel-Lucent innovation bootcamp team with an innovative concept (and patent) on cloud services.. In 2013 Olivier joined iMinds (now imec) where a lead the business model practice in the imec.livinglabs team. As program manager imec.living labs, he is responsible for the definition and implementation of the service offering and go2market strategy.