Why I moved in with college students to build a better app

Last (school) year, I spent 6 months living with undergrads, attending classes, and getting involved with extracurriculars at UC Berkeley. I'm 30. And a startup CEO (ex TaskRabbit's 2nd eng. /1st product mgr).

This was a design experiment taking observation / user testing to an extreme: complete immersion. I published my notes on VentureBeat, but really would like to hear what the hn community thinks of using immersion as a design technique. Innovative customer development or ridiculous waste of time?