Arjan Geven - Weens World

It’s been quite a while, but back to business. After a very long period of silence, time to give some updates! Have been traveling quite a bit lately, and it seems to have had an influence on the amount of blog posts here.

So, what have I been up to in the last few months? Well, let’s begin with say I’m still working at CURE , and still mainly working on the project Laboranova , dealing with innovations idea stimulation, support and management. We are still in the process of defining the exact boundaries of the system, and my role is to ensure a match between user needs and system functionality. This is of course relatively tough when uses normally see idea generation as a “black box” process that just happens. Through user involvement we try to find out which areas can particularly be supported and (hopefully) also how. As I’m writing this, I’m traveling to such a user involvement workshop J reviewing a Laboranova ‘storyboard’ that shows Some of the main functionality of the future system, based on early mockups and discussions.

I’ve also done some work on preparing for the next round of EU project support, focusing on user acceptance, usability and accessibility of ict for the support of older people. This took quite some time, travel and energy, hopefully it pays of! Competition is tough and the budget is small, so all we can do now is hope for the results of the evaluation. With 126 submitted “small and medium-sized” project, the chances of acceptance are rather low (statistically seen, somewhere between 2-3% I guess). I hope the invested time pays off!

Now, back to Laboranova development!