We’re pretty excited that only a few weeks after we came up with this crazy idea to start a community device testing lab in Washington, DC, we’ve found a location for the lab!

Canvas Co/work has generously agreed to host Device Lab DC in their awesome space near Dupont Circle.

If you aren’t familiar with Canvas, they’re a community-centric, collaborative co-working space. Canvas regularly hosts community events, so you may have already been in their inspiring space on 19th & M NW, and you may have even played ping-pong on their fantabulous ping-pong table.

But don’t head over there just yet — we’re not quite ready to open the device lab, as we still need to come up with all the devices that will be available for you to use. This is where we need you to help us out.

• Donate Your Mobile Phone/Device
  I know all of you pre-ordered your iPhone 5 today. Once it arrives, can you donate your old phone to Device Lab DC? Or, maybe you have a few older phones stuck in the bottom drawer of your desk? They just need to have a web browser of some sort. We need feature phones as well as smartphones. As well as tablets, ereaders, or whatever else you have that can display websites. Just let us know!
• Get Involved
  We also need people who want to get involved in the effort. This is a community project, so please get in touch and let us know how you want to participate. Especially if you know a lot about mobile devices, and can work on curating our collection and getting everything set up. Or alternately if you know absolutely nothing about mobile devices and want to take this opportunity to learn. Either way, we’d love to have you.

Please stay tuned for updates on our progress. We’re hoping to be ready to launch in a couple months.

Thanks again to Canvas Co/work for helping us make this happen!

We apparently did not have a good content strategy in place when we created this website during a 10-minute coffee break at the conference we were attending this morning, as a couple people have already asked: So what is this “device lab” thing you’re talking about?

Great question, actually. The short answer is:

A device lab is a collection of many different web-capable devices that are available for web designers/developers to use for testing.

If you design or develop websites, you have certainly figured out by now that your users visit your site from a variety of devices: phones, tablets, ebook readers, desktop computers, laptops, game consoles, etc. You have probably realized that your website will not look the same on every device. You may have also realized that people will be interacting with your site differently from all those devices, mostly using keyboard, mouse, touch, and various combinations of the three.

Although emulators or other tools can give you a general idea of how your site will look on different size screens, they can’t accurately predict how all mobile browsers will display a website, and they can’t help you understand how users will interact with the site through various input methods. The only way to know if your site is going to look and perform as expected on any particular mobile device is to test it on that mobile device.

Realistically, most of us can’t go out and buy every device so that we can have it available for testing. But the solution is pretty simple: we share.

A community device lab is basically just a group of local web folks working together to collect a wide range of devices (generally through donations) and then making those devices available to other local designers/developers to use for testing.

They’re already doing this in Portland, OR and in Brighton, England, and now we’re going to try to do it here in Washington, DC.

We just got started earlier today, so we don’t have much progress to report. Follow us on Twitter (@devicelabdc) if you want us to keep you updated. Email us if you’re interested in getting involved in the planning, or if you want to donate a device.

If you’re at An Event Apart, you’ve heard that a community device testing lab is an awesome way for designers and developers to be able to test on a lot of devices without having to purchase all of them.

We just started talking about this today, so we don’t have any firm plans yet. We’d love to hear your ideas.

Please email if you are interested in participating or donating devices.

Right now I’m busy listening to Ethan Marcotte talk about responsive design, but I’ll write more later today.

info [at] devicelabdc.com
@devicelabdc