The Celtic project Encompas (Enabling Community Communications – Platforms and Applications) organizes a workshop “Connectivity at Home – User centric application design and deployment” 6.9. 2006 from 9.00 – 18.00 in Lume Centre, University of Art and Design, Helsinki.

During the past years, multiple initiatives have tried to speed up the deployment of new networked products and applications at home and the growth of the EU Economy in the areas of Consumer Electronics, telecom services, white appliances, brown goods…. However, it is really a complex problem to solve. Indeed, deploying effectively new attractive applications to the residential market is really the major challenge for the involved actors (i.e. Companies and Public Authorities). During this workshop, the successful approach followed by the Celtic Encompas (Enabling Community Communications – Platforms and Applications) project will be detailed and discussed with other international experts.

Under the Encompas’ prism, different actions are necessary to be taken to correctly tackle with this challenge: at the platform dimension (remote management, service provisioning platforms…), at the user dimension (application co-design and user experiences) and at the validation dimension, including lab tests and field trials with true end-users.

Firstly, in the user dimension, the focus is put on personal, creative, social and interactive applications. Traditionally, the industry looked for product designs, not paying enough attention to ecosystemic problems that the users must face and solve alone, with little help from the producers, and creating one of the most severe usability problems for new products. In order to cope with the challenging social background, to empower the users to innovate and in order to make sure that the designs are influenced by the user’s practices and the ecosystemic whole in which they live, a co-design approach can be adopted. The co-design approach includes both a design philosophy as well as practical working methods. It is believed that co-design is ultimately about collaborative design activities, but it is equally important to realize that these design collaborations need to be facilitated by a benign environment and a set of construction materials and tools that lend themselves for design by users. During the workshop, experiences about co-design (including Encompas’ activities) will be presented, but also discussed during a panel discussion.

Then, the platform dimension includes the set up of the needed infrastructure for the deployment, operation and support of the new products and services for the connected home, building an end-to-end platform that allows, easily and efficiently, the inclusion of content and service providers along with large numbers of end users. In addition to this, it must also fill the knowledge gap and deploy more complex services for less experienced people. At the end, the aim is to increase the average revenue per user through new value-added services and to reduce the operational expenditure by remote management, troubleshooting and mass market strategies. To cover this issue, the workshop includes a panel discussion and presentations of related initiatives (besides Encompas).

Finally, in the validation dimension, the platforms and applications are checked at European level by means of the integration and deployment of them in test labs, in demonstrators and in pre-commercial experiences (field trials) to assure technical and user acceptance and to study the related operational and business aspects. Among other activities, a distributed test-bed across different countries was considered very useful to verify that the different components are able to interoperate and adapt to customers with different social backgrounds. All these steps are aiming to reach the needed critical mass of users, applications, service providers and contents for all European homes. Activities in this area will be also presented during the workshop.

Event programme:

9:00 - 9:30 Welcome Coffee

9:30 - 12:00 Workshop on co-design

At present many design and research groups do their work from a user-centric perspective. In this workshop we wish to give room for exchange of experiences of co-design and discussion of ways to meet challenges. We invite to participate design- and research groups who use co-design type of methodology in their work

9:30- 12:00 Workshop on service provivioning

Workshop on service provisioning Today, delivering complex applications to the home environment is a challenge. In this workshop we wish to give room for exchange of experiences about implementing remote management, about building and managing infrastructure and about the role of the home gateway in this scenario

12:00 - 13:00 Buffet Lunch and demonstrations of Encompas results

13:00 - 14:15 Welcoming words - Jose Maria Montero (Telefonica R & D, Project coordinator for Encompas)

Keynote Speakers:

• Mr. Mika Pantzar (Head of Research, Dr., University lecturer, National Consumer Research Centre)

• Mr. Paolo Pastorino (CTO and CBO of the Home Gateway Initiative)

14:15 - 14:30 Coffee break and demonstrations of Encompas results

14:30 - 15:30 Presentation of current on going initiatives about services design and provisioning

15:30 - 16:30 Panel Discussion: "Families and technologies at home. Mediasharing"

16:30 - 19:00 Wine and Snacks and demonstrations of Encompas results

19:00 End of the event

See you the 6th September 2006, in Lume center, University of Art and Design, Helsinki

Register here: http://encompas.org/reg/

The contact persons are: • Jose Maria Montero jmonter@tid.es, +34 91 337 98 12 • Iina Oilinki ioilinki@uiah.fi