Community practice of living labs

The concept living lives originated from the MIT professor, William Michelle, a prominent leader in MediaLab and the School of Architecture and City Planning who proposed it as a participatory methodology for researching users’ real living environments, with the goal of innovation of services, products or applications. This approach is well suited to ICT innovations. With the medical profession currently facing unprecedented challenges, medical humanities enhances professionals’ capacities for facing new technological developments and the social environmental challenges, as well as cultivating a high degree of self-reflection in the medical profession.

So… Our project uses the concept of living labs to create a systematic and participatory approach to providing health care and strengthening community in tribal areas. Here is the service learning we have contacted in tribal areas since the beginning of the medical humanities curriculum reform. And here is the place, that we incooperate those resources from the health administrations, regional hospitals and tribal areas, to provide a sustainable platform in ICT innovation purposes. So… The geological location of this tribe is in a remote area. However, through the e-learning and tele-care facilities, they can get a support from the neighborhood township. And the more important is that, we create an e-health platform for living labs.

We think this kind of platform will not only incorporate various kind of tele-care facility in Taiwan. The most important part is that we created an autonomous community cloud for Jin-Yue tribe where people, especially community leaders in this community can manage it on their own. And also, formed a partnership with researchers as well as with professors and students from universities.

So… This is the way we design a living labs workshop. Oral history taking on the August 20 has let them to learn from the device users about their life experiences in general. And then, they collected the users’ health related narratives on the second day. Students then continued to work in pairs to design a prototype ICT project for the tribe.

And then, they reported the results of this participatory approach on the university campus in the following week, on August 30. Students made final presentations of their designs to the three research team members, two outside scholars, seven community leaders and some other community participants on September 3.

And through the kind of process, with a workshop design, over 2 weekends, among these 2 workshops, we design a working platform for students from the universities can engage their time in group form for the tribal areas.