Technology Experience Café is an organizational methodology enabling a direct dialogue between final users of particular new technologies and representatives of those technologies with the aim to facilitate the greater degree of user acceptance of new products and services based on the technologies in question.
On one hand, TEC is a powerful instrument to enable user experience evaluation within a commonly used User Centred Design methodology, thus supporting research and technology development. On the other hand, TEC represents a social innovation, which provides an opportunity for older people to get exposed to the latest developments in science and technology and contribute to the process of new products/services development.
Within the EU FP7 SIforAGE project the TEC organizational concept was further developed and extended to be then applied for engaging older persons in the process of research and technology development for Active and Healthy Ageing. The organizational diversity and importance of taking into account country-specific peculiarities was demonstrated by holding 4 pilot events in 4 European countries, namely:
- France, Troyes, organizer Agency CARINNA http://www.carinna.fr/
- Italy, organizer City of Turin, http://www.comune.torino.it
- Denmark, Copenhagen, organizer INVESTORNET-Gate2Growth http://gate2growth.com/
- Germany, Saarbruecken, organizer German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence http://www.dfki.de/
This website integrates the findings SIforAGE obtained in this field and provides consulting support to those who are willing to organize TECs in the future. Our intention is also to enable a wider use of the TEC concept through the community building activities to be supported by this website as well.