Living Lab Kobo

Based on our research experience using participatory approach we established a Living Lab Kobo that gathers a multidisciplinary group of scientists, researchers, IT professionals and social activists whose key focus is on multiple positive applications of ICT: for better intergenerational cooperation, social inclusion and cohesion by engaging people from groups typically excluded from main technogogical discourse, i.e. older adults, to facilitate their involvement in co-creating modern ICT solutions.

The Kobo association creates spaces where people, science and technology meet to learn and contribute to the greater good for all of us. Kobo in Japanese means a workshop or a studio. Our Kobo is an evolution of a well established Living Lab concept from MIT — it is our approach to a distributed Living Lab 2.0, allowing us to meet people where they naturally spend time and bring them the hottest technology underpinned with science.

HASE network

Based on Kobo Living Lab research activities we have established an initiative of collaboratig research labs and teams HASE - Human Aspects of Science and Engineering. The core research network consist of:

• XR Center PJAIT, head: Wiesław Kopeć, Ph.D, MBA
  Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology,
• EC Lab USWPS (Emotion Cognition Lab), head: Monika Kornacka, Ph.D.
  SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities,
• VR Lab IP PAS (Virtual Reality and Psychophysiology Lab), head: Grzegorz Pochwatko, Ph.D.
  Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences,
• LIT (Laboratory of Interactive Technologies), head: Cezary Biele, Ph.D.
  National Information Processing Institute - National Research Institute.

Transdisciplinary research

Within our scientific collaboration network we have a lot of transdisciplinary research areas and framework of long-term collaboration including:

• Alpha XR (human factors in space exploration)
• Volterra XR (preserving the cultural heritage)
• Crowd Lynx (preserving the wildlife and biodiversity)
• Business Process Automation (AI for greater good)

Our research network is also involved into organizing the annual transdisciplinary symposium of interactive laboratories and international scientific conference MIDI – Machine Intelligence and Digital Interaction.