Celebrating weirdness at the living lab

Jo Evans - CCO at trl, talks about the submarine view of a place and the value of grasping the psyche of people to innovate effectively

From the control centre at TRL’s London testbed, the Smart Mobility Living Lab in Woolwich, we can monitor 24km of public and private roads. By “monitor”, I mean “observe” from our CCTV cameras. What we witness on a daily basis is worthy of its own live-streaming channel. Until you see for yourself the weird and wonderful range of behaviours, it is difficult to comprehend the reality of... well, the real world. In our day to day lives we experience poor driving, odd reactions from other road users, or a-typical behaviour from time to time as we walk, cycle, drive or deliver stuff. Seeing it happen to other people is illuminating. I’ll bet you don’t see grannies going head to head on their mobility scooters very often.... or gangs of roller-skaters invade the road, or actually see the swarm effect created by hundreds of people rushing out of the mouth of a tube station. The litany of weirdness we see every day never ceases to amaze us.

It’s been understood for decades that if you put real people under observation, with their consent, they behave differently. They speak and act and interact differently to their normal patterns. The real insights into human behaviour come from discreet observation. Everyone understands the concept of Monday morning rush hour... but few have seen it as a physical phenomenon, how the swell of people starts way out, like a wave, and bottlenecks in unexpected places. The chaos of the school run... begins on individual driveways. The pushing and shoving at bus stops, the jaywalkers, the cyclists refusing to use their designated lanes, the van drivers blocking the road to load... these are all anticipated behaviours and can be factored into the design of solutions and services intended to improve city life. But it’s the rare events, the edge cases that really test the robustness of a concept, that a living lab like SMLL can deliver in spades. Real life is messy. Yet in these edge cases lie ripe opportunities for innovators to modify and adapt their ideas. It was the ability to observe that led to supermarkets luring shoppers to venture to the furthest corner of the store to buy bread by having the smell of freshly baked bread at the entrance. And on their way to the back corner every shopper bought extra things.

For innovators with disruptive technologies and services destined for smart city users, it is especially important for them to understand the psyche of their potential users, and the community in which they live. Whole groups of people have habits that impact on the place where they live. Who knew that the group who head to the gym at 4pm every Friday can cause the traffic to stop half a mile away?

Laboratories, test tracks, controlled environments, are all great for collecting performance data against strict requirements. The observational opportunity from a living lab is perhaps more valuable because it can very quickly reveal hidden habits that are not predictable. A perfect example of this are the piles of rental scooters and bikes that are thrown into canals. Why do people do that?

The London living lab is more like a smart city observatory. Or I’ve heard the experience afforded by the lab to be like watching fish from inside a submarine. Interesting enough, but if you then start changing the fishes’ environment, by switching lights on and off for instance, you can see completely new behaviours. As an observatory, real world testing is a 100% immersive activity, with untapped potential. In the nuances of deviations from anticipated interactions lie opportunities to refine services that deliver superior customer value and greater choice to consumers.

To put new smart city technologies and services through their paces in a real world environment provides their inventors with the chance to really understand and tune into everyday life and develop a ‘product’ that is ultimately more accessible and acceptable to the public. Real world testing is an economical and effective way to run through an innovation cycle, failing fast or perfecting a solution fast. It’s a low cost activity because the lab has all the monitoring and data harvesting infrastructure in place already. London’s streets are the best place to do rapid R&D not just for futuristic vehicle designs, but for the infrastructure needed to support them (charging, maintenance, comms etc), for calibrating their air quality impact, and determining how best to place them into the existing transport system to make use of current services, boarding points, uncongested routes. Real places are the perfect places to observe other road users and how they interact with a new feature. Just this past year at the SMLL testbed we’ve seen dramatic changes caused by the Elizabeth Line going operational. The tube exits directly onto a 4- lane carriageway, with one set of traffic lights, and it has completely changed the way that the traffic moves, and crowds of people just sort of pop out and spill across the road. It’s hard to believe that this was intentional. Compare this to “dieselgate”: the emissions testing was all theoretical, under fixed conditions. Once out in the real world, with erratic driving patterns, the vehicle emissions were entirely different, but with hindsight, mostly predictable. That scandal could have been avoided by simply driving around the testbed and collecting the emissions data from key locations where people idle or queue as a normal part of their journey.

These are all the reasons why the living lab was designed and built. Desk research, controlled test tracks, virtual testing... these all have a role to play in product development. But nothing can replace the scrutiny of interaction with unpredictable humans as the final opportunity to gauge the potential commercial success of something. Smart cities are hailed as the future, better places to live and play and work, with integrated access to stuff via apps on smartphones. Yet app designers are missing out on the chance to see how good their user interface actually is when frustrated or frightened or intoxicated humans attempt to use it in the rain, in the dark, without a signal. Everyday life is just so demanding, so products intended to support those communities, that space, that place, have to meet demanding criteria.

In the world of Formula1 racing, they never stop with the R&D. The teams of engineers test the cars every day. Yet even during a race, they change the parameters, the setup, the driver handling, in response to the exact race conditions, always monitoring, always observing, always learning, always improving. It’s real time innovation.  SMEs of course don’t have those sorts of budgets nor access to F1 facilities. But a day with a prototype at the living lab, observing their product in action, in real time, means you can iterate the product capabilities inside its real environment. For my final analogy... face cream. The adverts say 78% of people noticed an improvement when using the cream. But in the small print they only asked 40 people. That’s not really representative of the target customer group. However if you gave 40 people a pot of cream to take home and watched what they did with it, you’d see the weird stuff happening, which might just reveal a whole new marketing opportunity for the formula.

It's the unusual that makes the living lab so valuable. At SMLL we embrace weirdness.