Living Social Media Lab aka Services to people with people

Last week I visited The Day of the Media Labs kindly hosted by Media Guild of Amsterdam.
A big hand to Andy and Margreet for suberb arrangements!

Photos: by Tommi Rissanen of Digibusiness Finland with a digital camera and blogger him self with Nokia E70 - guess which one is taken with which one.

Photo: PICNIC partners pitching session at Westergasfabriek.

It was a Partner Event of PICNIC happening.

I regard it after last week's experience a must for creative persons every autumn to go for a brain picnic. I got thrilled by the contrast of high tech and brick walls of the old gas factory by the Western park (Westergasfabriek) where we had our picnic.

The time treck was even higher at one of our Creative Tour stops, the Waag Society's headquarters, an old castle, where medieval met the web age.
Left: the Waag

Right: high tech mushed up with medieval roofpaintings

The picnic theme was realized even with free tasty dutch apples and fountain water. The atmosphere was Dam-like bit greenish and laid back. The programme was overhelming, so there were something for everything.

Another interesting stop of the Creative Tour was Zwijger warehouse (Pakhuis de Zwijger), the home of Media Guild. I describe it with a spectacula shot by my friend Tommi.

To learn more of PICNIC it self, check the blog of my colleague from Sweden, Patrik Svensson of Humlab, Umeå.

Is Forum Virium Helsinki a Media Lab?

MIT pioneers Negroponte & Co. launched the name "Media Lab" back in 1980. So the aim of the get together of Media Labs was "not only have the opportunity to show their latest work to the PICNIC public, but will also discuss their own perspective on the intersection of media and cultural experimentation, research and development, and their relevance and relationship to the needs of their community, culture and economy."

So while preparing my presentation to the meeting, I asked myself, is Forum Virium Helsinki a media lab. Yes, we do use in our development of new digital services a method known as living lab. Yes, in many new digital services we generate social media has a big role. For social media I have heard best explanation by Dr. Marko Turpeinen (Principal scientist at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and Professor in Media Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm): to build social media you need content, community and web 2.0 as a service platform. So we do have a sort of living social media lab.

So at the meeting I stated, that we have the city of Helsinki as a lab. We trust that people themselves know best what they need and how to use these new services. So we offer them the new services designed by the inventors as an early stage as possible to try them out and give us rapid user feedback to improve the services. We have learned, that early failure is cheap failure.

We also have learned, that people don't wanna live in labs, to be the guinean pigs. Further more, if you study the use of services in a lab, the environment isn't genuine, so you don't get reliable results. Anyway in Helsinki region we have a lot of volunteers to test our pilot services in their every day life.

And like another great Finn, the founder of Jaiku Jyri Engeström, stated at the PICNIC conference, the greatest new social media services serve one's every day life. He had an good example of him desperately buying baby clothes and getting to his Jaiku ask of help immediately dozens of good hints where to find baby clothing.

So this meeting got me thinking, that the future of media labs is in their capability to serve their community, to create value to their community, funders and personnel by creating new social media services to the society. Media labs should open up, go to the communities and develop new services to people with people.

Also media labs should broden up their meaning of media from mass media to p2p, people to people media, regardless of the technology of the media. My colleague from Veronica of Amsterdam, Jan Hoogesteijn, christened it "bordless media".