A Position Paper on ’Living Laboratories’: Rethinking Ecological Designs and Experimentation in Human-Computer Interaction

HCI have long moved beyond the evaluation setting of a single user sitting in front of a single desktop computer, yet many of our fundamentally held viewpoints about evaluation continues to be ruled by outdated biases derived from this legacy. We need to engage with real users in 'Living Laboratories', in which researchers either adopt or create functioning systems that are used in real settings. These new experimental platforms will greatly enable researchers to conduct evaluations that span many users, places, time, location, and social factors in ways that are unimaginable before.