The Mobile VINN Excellence Centre
The Mobile Life VINN Excellence Centre was formed in 2007, and has established itself as an internationally recognized research locus in the area of mobile services. The centre is a joint venture between three research partners and nine industrial partners and with funding the Swedish governmental funding agency VINNOVA.
The Mobile Life Centre provides a view into our future life with digital technology; an enjoyment society where happiness, pleasure and play are adopted into all aspects of our lives. The unique strength of the Mobile Life Centre lies in its combination of leading edge applied research and intense collaboration with industry.
After five years, the Mobile Life Centre has grown to be about 45 researchers, exploring experiential, leisure and playful mobile and ubiquitous interactions. The research is interdisciplinary, involving researchers from computer science, interaction design, sociology, psychology but also game designers, artists, dancers, and fashion experts. The Centre’s competitive edge lies in making serious research on what we might normally portray as “unserious” activities in collaboration with our industry partners Ericsson, Nokia, Microsoft Research, IKEA, ABB TeliaSonera, P, Movinto Fun and Stockholm City.
We get inspired by doing studies on people's mundane leisure and creative activities such as horseback riding, hunting, parkour, dancing or role-playing. We use those insights to spur innovative design processes, resulting in mobile applications, sensor-based applications, pervasive games, Mobile Mash-Up services, new mobile media, technical platforms and materials to support amateurs' creativity.
The centre is internationally visible: it was selected as the second lab to be featured in the international journal Interaction’s series of important HCI (Human Computer Interaction) labs around the world. The scientific productivity is high, with high visibility at international conferences and in journal publications, as well as in the launch of several books. Results are demonstrated in the form of new playful activities and applications such as pervasive games and social media on the road, and through developing tools and methods for design. The centre is actively pursuing commercialisation of its research results, with several patents and spin-off projects in the process.
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Please take a look at our printed material such as our annual reports and folders to get to know more about our center!
