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Short history of living labs. Research and policy context. When looking back through the European history of ICT innovation and user involvement, three main predecessors can be discovered that carry the roots of the current living labs movement: the Scandinavian cooperative and participatory design movement from the 1960s and 70s, the European social experiments with IT in the 1980s, and the Digital City projects from the 1990s.
ICT innovation and user involvement in Europe The tradition of cooperative and participatory design can be traced back to the 1960s and 70s, when research projects on user participation in systems development took place all over Scandinavia. These early initiatives were supported by trade unions and involved workers in the design of IT applications in the workplace. Next to the active user involvement, this cooperative design also introduced the facilitation of trial use situations as part of the design process, so as to stage users’ hands-on experience with future applications, which puts the focus on the real-life context. Because IT later became prevalent not only at work but also at home, in school and even while “on the move�, cooperative design has struggled somewhat to embrace the fact that much technological development no longer happens as design of isolated systems in well-defined communities of