Regional strategic impact through creative use of ICT (LLMidt)
Key points of LLMidt:
1) A collection of living labs in a small area crossing many different sectors brings a unique opportunity to obtain insight into the strategic development of a geographical area.
2) With the Central Denmark Region as the main stakeholder, access to regional installations and organisations can be easily coordinated.
3) User driven innovation is a core methodology for the main partners in the living lab, offering many years of experience.
4) In the long run and in addition to European funding, local funding can be released to supplement individual living labs.
Description
LLMidt will be a collection of several living lab installations in different physical locations and targeting different sectors. We already have a strong set of living labs in the context of health and entertainment with some living labs kicking off in terms of energy and environment in the near future. Our primary target sectors are: Transportation, Food and Agriculture, Health, Energy and Environment and Tourism/Entertainment. From the regional and city perspective we are interested in the strategic impact of ICT. We believe that investigation of this broad set of topics will provide patterns that can be generalised providing invaluable knowledge to develop new policies and strategies for public-private partnerships and innovation at the regional and city levels; possibly even transforming the inner workings of governance and the organisations themselves.
The LLMidt is coordinated by the Central Denmark Region, the City of Aarhus, SkiveET, the Alexandra Institute and Aarhus University, Center for Digital Urban Living (DUL). The secretariat of the LL is formed out of the Region, the Alexandra Institute and Aarhus University.
References and Track Record
• Egmont Hoejskolen - a boarding school for young students with disabilities. The school have several years of living lab experience on exploring the use of assistive technologies in the everyday life of the students during their stay, together with companies and researchers
• The Village of Soelund living lab is based on Denmark’s largest “village” for mentally and physically challenged adult people. The personal relations between staff and residents constitute the basis for developing new assistive and communication technologies in the village.
• The “At a glance” project in relationship to the Skanderborg Festival living lab provides the overall communication and coordination during the festival related to health and security. Thousands of volunteers use technology developed as part of the project for several years now, providing safety and wellbeing to over 50,000 music enthusiasts.
• The Danish national research center Digital Urban Living (DUL) has been a de facto living lab for years, initiating, coordinating and hosting many projects exploring interaction and experiences in public space. DUL has developed and tested a number of large-scale interactive urban media platforms, from media façades to new forms of civic communication and digital journalism.
