I recently had the pleasure of teaching a workshop on co-design techniques at UTS as part of their new Design Masters program. The term co-design refers to a range of things and is a philosophical and political approach to design best applied throughout the design life cycle [1]. The focus of this particular session was on techniques that you might use at the fuzzy-front end of the design process and included hands-on examples of the kinds of activities we might do as part of a co-design workshop. This post is a summary of the key messages on co-design covered as part of the session. (A second post will summarise the day and some of the questions from the students). 

The premise:

Design lives in the world. It is social and situated, people use our designs as part of their everyday lives. This means we have a responsibility with regards to how and what we design. For me, an aspect of this responsibility is supporting the active involvement and participation of ‘users’ (people/stakeholders/those impacted by the design) in the design process. ‘Users’ are the experts of their own domain. As designers it is our role to facilitate their involvement. That is, to support participants to imagine, express and access their experiences and expectations so that they can actively and effectively participate in the design process. That people have the right to influence their own lives and therefore should be involved in the design process is a fundamental premise of Participatory Design. Co-design methods (which build on the methods and principles of early Participatory Design) are a way to do this.

Some principles & theory

At the beginning of the design process our goal is to:

• Understand the design situation
• Gain insights and explore possibilities
• Understand what any proposed design project would mean for the people impacted…what are the opportunities and challenges?

When taking a co-design approach all of this happens with users. They become partners in the design process helping us to shape the definition and direction of the design project.

Importantly, this goes well beyond “asking users what they want”. [2]

In this kind of early design research we look beyond the product being designed. E.g., it’s not just about how the person might respond to a new mobile phone app. It’s how the app, and the phone might be appropriated into the persons existing ecology, what is the broader context in which any new design might sit, how might any new designs be taken up and used?

We want to explore, and co-discover with our participants, things like:

But…people are not explicit sources of information…(Greenbaum and Madsen 1993).

It’s not possible to just extract this kind of knowledge from people….because:

• We are limited in what we can express, people can only talk in the language that they know
• Many of our experiences and knowledge is tacit or embedded in the everyday. Our habits, rituals, dreams and attitudes are not (necessarily) things that we have on tap to describe to design researchers, we may not even be aware of them ourselves.

Instead we can use co-design methods, also known as ‘generative’ design research methods, to help make things that are normally unobservable available  as resources for design.

Sleeswijk Visser suggests that while methods such as interviews and observations give us access to the explicit and observable, generative methods allow us to access the tacit and implicit aspects of people’s lives.

Generative methods are designed to, “allow us to gain access to a hidden world of user experience” (Sleeswijk Visser, 2009)

Some practice…

So…how do we make people’s everyday experiences available for discussion? How do we get people to remember and share things that are so ingrained? [3]

We use methods that are:

• Visual, creative, expressive

There is an emphasis on visual materials, making things and use of imagery as a way for people to make associations and communicate.

• Physical and tangible

Physically making things helps people to explore, verbalise, remember and imagine (Sanders in particular emphasis the “make” aspect of generative methods).

• Based on story telling

We naturally tell stories, actual stories and examples help put things into context, they are also a central way of sharing, communicating and visioning. Creating and telling stories (real or imagined) can be visual, verbal or include role play, they help to prompt, remind, and brings things that are normally tacit out into the foreground.

• Playful, fun and embrace ambiguity

Fun is a deeply important aspect of participation, it is central to developing platforms for sharing, trust building, confidence and helping people open up. It is also part of keeping people’s energy levels up, if people are tired and the activities too serious, people will lose interest. Co-design sessions should be fun and enjoyable as well as ‘productive’. (They are also key relationship building activities). Ambiguity is important for allowing creative and unusual connections to be made and leaves space for people to apply and explore their own interpretations of things.

• Reflective, personal, subjective

Interventions that support reflection and introspection help to make things that are otherwise embedded into our ‘everyday’ accessible and sharable.  For this reason it is very common to do reflection or ‘primer’ exercises before workshops, such as diaries or cultural probes. Asking people to observe their own behaviours for a period of time, brings things to the surface before an interview or workshop [4].

The outcomes:

Co-design sessions:

• Allow us to create a shared understanding and shared language between participants and the designers.

They enable immersion, dialogue and empathy, we start to understand the design from the point of view of the participants. The outputs are sources of both inspiration and information for designers and participants to work with in visioning future designs. They are information gathering and design generating activities, blurring the boundaries of research and design (Sanders 2008).

And they are:

• Designerly

The outputs from these kinds of methods differ significantly from interviews, surveys or observations. They generate rich visual, subjective and tangible material to work with.  Designers benefit from working with concrete things they can see and feel and the immediacy and accessibility of this kind of material makes it a natural resource for designers, quite different to that of a report. Imagery for example can be quickly scanned and absorbed (Mattelmäki & Battarbee, 2002). For designers this kind of material can be much more accesible than traditional research outputs. To understand the significance of designerly methods – I recommend checking out Sanders map of design research methods. In it Sanders talks about older more established styles of research which rely on systematic data analysis. Newer, design driven forms of research focus on tools for expression, reflection and sharing (and they are subjective).

[1] The term codesign is now widely used within product, UX and Service design fields. My own interpretation of co-design is based on the principles of Participatory Design and is best represented by the extensive work of Liz Sanders. Check out Sanders extensive selection of papers on her website for more about the different types of generative activities she’s been developing and evolving for the last 20 years.

[2] In a couple of recent presentations I got some people’s backs up for ‘pissing all over the quote by Ford’.

The quote in question goes something like: “If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses“. I’ve seen this quote used (more than once) at nearly every design/UX/technology conference I have attended in the last few years and my frustration over its use is because frankly I think it’s a bit of a cop-out. Invariably it gets hauled out and used as a excuse or justification not to involve or ‘ask’ users – clearly they can’t come up with innovations! The flaw here of course – (recognised by most people in UX that I know of) is that there is rarely a good justification for simply “asking users what they want”. As @voirol astutely put it, if that was the answer then you asked the wrong question. In fact such direct questioning (e.g., what features would you like) are unlikely to be a part of any serious design research process. Our questions and techniques have to be much more sophisticated than this, co-design and participatory design methods are examples of a very different approach to involving users in the design process.

[3] For example see Sanders comments on primes in the paper Design Research in 2006. Also the article Not to Prime is a crime by Jodie Moule on Johnny Holland. More about the reflective nature of diaries can be found on the Mobile Diaries article also on Johnny Holland.

Further references include:

Gaver, W., Beaver, J., & Benford, S. (2003). ‘Ambiguity as a Resource for Design’. CHI, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA. ACM,  pp.

Gaver, W., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., & Walker, B. (2004). ‘Cultural Probes and the value of uncertainty’. Interactions, Volume XI(5), pp. 53-56.

Gaver, B., Dunne, T., & Pacenti, E. (1999). ‘Design: Cultural Probes’. Interactions, pp. 21-29.

Greenbaum, J., & Madsen, K. H. (1993). PD a personal statement. Communications of the ACM. Special issue on graphical user interfaces: the next generation, 36(6), pp.

Halskov, K., & Dalsgård, P. (2006). ‘Inspiration Card Workshops’. DIS, University Park, PA, USA. ACM

Mattelmäki, T. (2005). ‘Applying probes – from inspirational notes to collaborative insights’. CoDesign, 1(2), pp. 83-102.

Mattelmäki, T. (2008). ‘Probing for co-exploring’. CoDesign, 4(1), pp. 65 – 78.

Mattelmäki, T., & Battarbee, K. (2002). ‘Empathy Probes’.  PDC’02. Malmö, Sweden, CPSR.

Sanders, E. B.-N. (2006). Design Research in 2006. Design Research Quarterly, 1.

Sanders, L. (2008). An Evolving Map of Design Practice and Design Research Interactions (November – December), pp. 13-17.

Sanders, L. (2001). Collective Creativity. LOOP: AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education 7(June ). Retrieved from

Sanders, E. B.-N., Brandt, E., & Binder, T. A framework for organizing the tools and techniques of participatory design.  Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference. Sydney, Australia, ACM.

Sanders, E., & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the New Landscapes of Design. CoDesign, 4(1), pp. 5-18.

Sleeswijk Visser, F. (2009). Bringing the everyday life of people into design. PhD Thesis Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft.

Sleeswijk Visser, F., Stappers, P. J., Lugt, R. V. D., & Sanders, E. B.-N. (2005). Contextmapping: experiences from practice. CoDesign, 1(2), pp. 119-140.

(See http://studiolab.io.tudelft.nl/sleeswijkvisser/publications to access papers by Sleeswijk Visser)

The discipline of design is in a constant state of change. As noted in the previous post one of the most significant trends currently impacting on design practice is the opening up of the design process. Design is moving out from the studio and into the wild, taking place where people live [1].  Users are being re-cast as co-designers, co-creators and co-developers. Trends such as ‘open design’, ‘crowdsourcing’, designing for design in use, post-release iterations and ‘emergent design’ provide new ways for people to participate in the design process,  and challenge some of our traditional models of design.

The paper Dissolving boundaries: social technologies and participation in design [Preprint_Pdf] being presented at OZCHI this November is an attempt to provide a ‘lay of the land’.  We look at key trends and opportunities for supporting participation in design from across industry and research and point to some of questions about roles and responsibilities they raise for design practitioners. The paper, and the proposed discussion at Interaction10 (submission pasted below for prosperity), are an attempt to promote and contribute to ongoing discussion on how these shifts are changing design practice.

The sketches (scribbles) in this post were fundamental for thinking through, conceptualising and communicating the various ways design is being reshaped, and for starting to think about models of participation. I recently also came across these (much more refined!) sketches that also visualise emerging co-creation and codesign models.

Discussion Proposal submitted to IXD10.

Design in the wild: the practitioners new playground

Design is moving into the wild, propelled in part by the participatory nature of social technologies. Trends such as ‘open design’ which supports mass participation in the design process, ‘crowdsourcing’ of design ideas and skills from the public, ‘design after design’ or ‘design in use’ where design is iterated post-release and ‘emergent design’ where seed prototypes are shaped through use, challenge some of our traditional models of design.

In this shifting design landscape boundaries between design and use, and designer and user begin to blur. Not for the first time, but for the first time on this scale, design is moving out of the studio and taking place in more public forums. These shifts in design practice and process are generating questions about roles, responsibilities and appropriate frameworks for participation and decision-making.

In this session we’ll sketch out some of the challenges and opportunities currently facing us as practitioners. The discussion will be framed around the following topics:

- The suitability of existing methods to cater to this emerging design space
- The directions of emerging methods
- Potential frameworks for supporting participation and decision-making
- The impact these changes are having to our roles, responsibilities and skill-sets as design practitioners.

This session will be an opportunity for practitioners to share their ideas, concerns and thoughts, as well as explore what shifts are already happening, or may be necessary, to support these emerging forms of participation and collaboration in design.

References

1. Lee, Y., ‘Design participation tactics: the challenges and new roles for designers in the co-design process’, CoDesign, vol. 4, no. 1, (2008) pp. 31 – 50.

q. 1 How do our methods need to be extended or adapted to support design in the wild?

q. 2 How do we position our own practice in relation to this dynamic and changing design space?

These are two questions I posed at the end of a recent presentation I was invited to give at UTS to Masters students from the School of Design, Architecture and Building (edited slidedeck above). While the focus was an introduction to Personas and Scenarios (new to many of the students from outside the field of Interaction Design) the presentation also highlighted new trends or “strong currents” currently influencing design.

The aim of the presentation was to introduce some of the methods or “tools” we already have that support us in thinking about design in relation to use, as well as point to ways in which the relations between design and use are becoming more dynamic and intertwined.

This is an opportunity for us as practitioners to reflect on our practice, and think through how our existing tools are being, or may need to be, extended or augmented as we shift into new areas.

In particular we discussed a (conceptual and literal) shift from designing products to designing services and the impact trends such as crowdsourcing, DIY design and social media are having on professional design practice. Traditional boundaries between design and use are blurring as design activities become more public and relate to a larger more complex ‘eco systems’: design (and designing!) is escaping into the wild.

The closing questions above are also the subject of a paper I’ll be presenting at Ozchi in Melbourne later in the year, and I hope to be facilitating a discussion on the topic of Design in the Wild: The practitioners new playground next year at IXD10 (submission currently being reviewed).

UX Australia was a fantastic conference, thanks again to the organisers!

Methods can be a bit like a black box. Embedded within them are particular assumptions about design and participation that can be unwittingly projected into our design process and outcomes. If we hope to privilege sociability, flexibility and openness in our designs, these values can be better supported through some tools and techniques more than others. In my thesis I have drawn attention to particular qualities and concepts relevant to design in the context of social technologies. I’m in the process of making these available to others in different ways such as maps, vocabularies and considerations.

mapping goals, experiences, enablers and qualities in early design research

Design tools like concept maps and sketches  allow us to analyse and visualise things in different ways. In this context they can make visible important, though often implicit, aspects of methods. The (draft) map above describes the use of social technologies as a self-reporting/live prototyping tool in early design research. It takes into account goals of the design method, experiences that are of value in this context and qualities of the tools and technique that become enablers for these experiences. By mapping a relationship between design goals, qualities and enablers (methods) the intention is to make more visible connections between the tools, techniques and the values they embody.

The first two goals, immersion and intervention, take into account the perspective and experiences of the designer and participant. The third goal, seeding, represents the relationship between them, and between design and use. The qualities of digital self-reporting e.g over-time, in situ, visually rich, personal, mobile and so on enable the kinds of experiences (e.g reflection, inspiration) that support these desired goals.

The map is not meant to be prescriptive or exhaustive. Rather it is meant as a tool for encouraging discussion, reflection and decision-making. The map and its explanation are still very much works in progress.

Immersion, intervention and seeding are three key concepts that have emerged out of my work on participatory and designerly design methods that name things important (but at times implicit) to our practice^.

^ Designerly methods embody the creative, visual and exploratory nature of design, while participatory methods embody a commitment to active participation by users in design.

References: (A full literature review a reference list can be provided, in the mean time here are some selected key texts that have been instrumental in my work).
1.    Robertson, T.: Ethical Issues in Interaction Design. Ethics and Information Technology 8 (2006)
2.    Visser, F.S., Stappers, P.J., Lugt, R.V.D., Sanders, E.B.-N.: Contextmapping: experiences from practice. CoDesign 1 (2005) 119-140
3.    Visser, F.S., Lugt, R.v.d., Stappers, P.J.: Sharing User Experiences in the Product Innovation Process: Participatory Design Needs Participatory Communication. Creativity and Innovation Management 16 (2007) 35-45
4.    Botero, A., Kommonen, K.-H., Oilinki, I., Koskijoki, M.: Codesigning Visions, Uses, and Applications. TechnE Design Wisdom” 5th European Academy of Design Conference, Barcelona (2003)
5.    Botero, A., Saad-Sulonen, J.: Co-designing for new city-citizen interaction possibilities: weaving prototypes and interventions in the design and development of Urban Mediator. PDC’09. ACM, Bloomington, USA (2008)
6.    Hulkko., S., Mattelmäki, T., Virtanen, K., Keinonen, T.: Mobile Probes. NORDICHI 04, Tampere, Finland (2004)
7.    Gaver, B., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., Walker, B.: Subjective Design for Everyday Life. CHI 2003 (2003)
8.    Merkel, C.B., Xiao, L., Farooq, U., Ganoe, C.H., Lee, R., Carroll, J.M., Rosson, M.B.: Participatory Design in Community Computing Contexts: Tales from the Field PDC’04. ACM, Toronto, Canada (2004)
9.    Kensing, F., Blomberg, J.: Participatory Design: Issues and Concerns. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 7 (1998) 167-185
10.    Näkki, P., Antikainen, M., Virtanen, T.: Participatory Design in an Open Web Laboratory Owela CHI08. ACM, Florence, Italy (2008)
11.    Stolterman, E.: The Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research. International Journal of Design 2 (2008)
12.    Dourish, P.: Where the Action Is. MIT Press (2001)

Emerging a User Experience Strategy: people, pencils and post-its is the title of the presentation @michellegilmore and I will be giving at UX Australia at the end of August. The conference is happening for the first time this year and there is an excellent range of speakers. The event will be a much appreciated addition to Australia’s calendar of UX and HCI events. A brief outline of our presentation is provided below based on our submission.

Michelle and I will be talking about the process of emerging a User Experience Strategy (or getting from fluffy to something). The approach we’ll be sharing emphasises collaborative and light-weight design methods (people, pencils and post-its). Drawing on a recent case study we’ll highlight experiences and techniques evolved over a number of projects and influenced by IxD and agile development methods.

The motivation for the presentation is a desire to capture, describe and make available for discussion aspects of the re-framing and translating that takes place as part of the process of developing a project-level User Experience Strategy.  Early project information and documentation often takes an organisational or technical perspective in describing the future system. A UX strategy on the other hand takes as its start point the perspective of those who will use the system. For the purposes of this presentation we define the development of a UX strategy as the process through which project information (e.g scope, project objectives, business requirements, user research, content analysis, comparative analysis, brand information) are critically translated and interpreted into a description of the future system from the perspective of the user experience.

The outcome is an agreement in principle to the objectives, the opportunities, the constraints, the scope (scale) and key principles of the design. It privileges the intended user experience whilst appropriately taking into account the various interests of the project such as business, brand, content and technology.

In the approach we’ll be sharing, the process starts by taking existing project information and translating it into relevant user stories. User stories are valuable for a number of reasons. They are versatile and accessible to all stakeholders. They become a common form of language across the design and client team and they can be prioritised as a way of making design decisions in relation to the user experience.

In our process groups of user stories are used to expose themes and activities that provide an initial (loose) structure. Prioritised user stories are then formed into key scenarios and  mapped out to expose the core user pathways, which are then iteratively refined. The structure of the system is allowed to emerge through this process of mapping the user experience and priorities for content and functionality fall out along the way. This can be challenging for members of the design team otherwise used to defining such aspects upfront (or top-down). Similarly various methods are needed to promote collaboration, trust and visibility of project process to the client throughout the process.

In our presentation we’ll be highlighting:

• How user stories are generated and then themed
• The process of prioritising user stories with clients to identify key complex scenarios
• How we collaboratively map the priority scenarios out and expose the core user pathways
• How these processes inform information architecture and user interface designs and
• Our choice of rapid and collaborative tools (e.g post – its, and pencils)
• Communicating the process to the client

The work upon which this presentation draws was completed on behalf of Digital Eskimo, a social design agency in Sydney whose Considered Design methodology makes embracing these methods and approaches possible. Our wonderful client was UNSW and we worked with other great team members from Zumio and Redrollers. Our presentation wouldn’t be possible without their generous committment to sharing the design experience and process, a big thank you to them and to the generous participants that gave their time to this project  (still in production).

‘Seeding’ refers to activities which enable or encourage the transfer of ownership from the designer to the user, and points to the moments in which which abstract design space engages with or shifts into concrete use space (for more info on these terms see references in this post)

Social technologies for prototyping

The term ‘seeding’ can be used to refer to a range of activities but the approach that I am most interested in currently makes use of existing social technologies such as blogs and mobile phones as prototyping tools.  Social technologies are rapidly being adapted into the repertoire of design researchers, Mobile Diaries (Digital Eskimo), Digital Etho (Cheskin, News Digital Media) and Digital Diaries (Frog) are all examples of  designers exploiting the mobile, digital and connected nature of these tools for early design research. However, it’s possible to move beyond the boundaries implied by “research”, and get straight into design. An example of this is the patchwork prototyping being done by Jones et al. [1]. In these projects existing technologies are configured as prototypes and deployed into the community. The tools themselves become the material through which early design exploration and research occurs, and potential uses emerge. A snip from Jones et al. in Handbook of Research on Open Source Software on Patchwork Prototyping:

the combining of open source software applications to rapidly create a rudimentary but fully functional prototype that can be used and hence evaluated in real life situations. The use of a working prototype enables the capture of more realistic and informed requirements than traditional methods that rely on users trying to imagine how they might use the envisaged system in their work, and even more problematic, how that system in use may change how they work. [1]

While this particular quote perhaps doesn’t capture the openness, flexibility and participatory nature of the process, the potential is there. Other researchers also using these kinds of online tools for early, participatory co-design are Owela (at VTT in Finland see also [2-5]) and Arki (Media Lab in Finland see also [6, 7]).

Design ‘in the wild’

There is a growing sense that some of our traditional UCD methods – that rely in large part testing during the “design phase” – prior to release – fall short in the context of social technologies that require participation and contribution by people to take their form e.g .[8].  Many development companies have been adopting a beta approach (or even perpetual beta) in part in response to this issue where the emphasis is ‘getting stuff out there’ in order to gain feedback (discussed in [9-11]). As part of this (and other changes to traditional design practices) design practitioners, UX in particular, are  finding ways to integrate with agile development processes. While I think there are a heap of positives about this, I see prototyping “in the wild” [12] as another exciting, design driven approach where seeding becomes a central design activity.

This was a very quick and oversimplified overview of some pretty complex shifts in practice, and I hope to provide a fuller account of these emerging  approaches and their relationship to our concepts of design and use in a different forum, for further references that tackle the issue of co-design and PD ‘in the wild’ see also [13-18]:[19, 20]

Reading/References

1.    Jones, M.C., Floyd, I.R., Twidale, M.B.: Patchwork Prototyping with Open Source Software. In: St.Amant, K., Still, B. (eds.): Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives. Information Science Reference, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA (2007) 126-140
2.    Näkki, P., Antikainen, M., Virtanen, T.: Participatory Design in an Open Web Laboratory Owela CHI08. ACM, Florence, Italy (2008)
3.    Näkki, P.: Owela: Open Web Laboratory for Innovation and Design. ERCIM News Vol. 2009 (2008)
4.    Owela. Vol. 2009
5.    Näkki, P., Antikainen, M.: Online Tools for Co-design: User Involvement through the Innovation Process. In: Karahasanović, A., Følstad, A. (eds.): NordiCHI 2008 workshops: Requirements Elicitation & HCI and Social Media Development Lund, Sweden (2008)
6.    Botero, A., Kommonen, K.-H., Oilinki, I., Koskijoki, M.: Codesigning Visions, Uses, and Applications. TechnE Design Wisdom” 5th European Academy of Design Conference, Barcelona (2003)
7.    Botero, A., Saad-Sulonen, J.: Co-designing for new city-citizen interaction possibilities: weaving prototypes and interventions in the design and development of Urban Mediator. PDC’09. ACM, Bloomington, USA (2008)
8.    Isbister, K., Höök, K.: On being supple: in search of rigor without rigidity in meeting new design and evaluation challenges for HCI practitioners. Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, Boston, MA, USA (2009)
9.    Merholz, P.: Embrace the chaos – designers and systems with emergent behavior. Vol. 2008 (2006) <http://www.peterme.com/archives/000793.html

http://www.peterme.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/499>

10.    Porter, J.: The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site. Vol. 2008 (2006) <http://www.uie.com/articles/fast_iterations/>.
11.    Holzapfel, N.: An unsuitable match: social media and User-Centred design. Johnny Holland (2008) http://johnnyholland.org/magazine/2008/11/an-unsuitable-match-social-media-and-user-centred-design/
12.    Hutchins, E.: Cognition in the Wild. MIT (1995)
13.    Battarbee, K., Cabrera, A.B., Mattelmäki, T., Rizzo, F.: Designed for Co-designers: Workshop Call for Participation. PDC 2008 (2008)
14.    Brereton, M., Buur, J.: New challenges for design participation in the era of ubiquitous computing. CoDesign 4 (2008) 101 – 113
15.    Rehead, F., Brereton, M.: Getting to the Nub of Neighbourhood Interaction. PDC’08. ACM, Bloomington, USA (2008)
16.    Cabrera, A.B.: Emerging Digital Practices of Communities In: käytännot, A.A.d. (ed.):  (2006)
17.    Karasti, H., Syrjänen, A.-L.: Artful Infrastructuring in Two Cases of Community PD Participatory Design Conference. ACM, Toronto, Canada (2004)
18.    Dittrich, Y., EriksénII, S., HanssonI, C.: PD in the Wild; Evolving Practices of Design in Use Participatory Design. CPSR, Malmö, Sweden, (2002)
19.    Merkel, C.B., Xiao, L., Farooq, U., Ganoe, C.H., Lee, R., Carroll, J.M., Rosson, M.B.: Participatory Design in Community Computing Contexts: Tales from the Field
. Participatory Design Conference. ACM, Toronto, Canada (2004)
20.    Merkel, C., Farooq, U., Xiao, L., Ganoe, C., Rosson, M.B., Carroll, J.M.: Managing technology use and learning in nonprofit community organizations: methodological challenges and opportunities. Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Computer human interaction for the management of information technology. ACM, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2007)

Introduction to creating personas and scenarios

There is a wealth of resources out there that explain how to create personas (and debate their value) – just check out this list on delicious.com for some of them. What I needed though was a simple overview of how you go from user research to actually developing scenarios and personas. I just wanted to capture the essence of the process in a very accessible format for an audience who had never been through anything similar before. So I bashed out this quick sketch of the process, showing the various stages we go through.

I’m still waiting for the audio which will make the presentation a little more meaningful, but there are stil some slides that make sense sans v/o.

I had the pleasure of attending Ozchi earlier this month presenting at Ozchi. It was a great conference, perhaps more relaxed than some years which I attribute to the temperature in Cairns.

My presentation focused on a reflection into changes in our role as designers, in light of social technologies. In particular I focused on the role of seeding as a design activity in forging a connection between a design project or concept, and the possible “user community” that it might target [[download pdf]]. Seeding describes an aspect of our design process or responsibility that exists in addition to (or perhaps instead of) the actions of constructing and crafting that we might have emphasised in earlier design mediums. The presentation seemed to be well received, though was of rather a different focus than the heavy heuristics analysis that went before it (good, but a very different tangent on design reflections).

Closer to my field was the talk that follow me by Mads Bødker who explored how the different generative design tools that we might provide our user’s in workshop sessions influences how they are able to articulate their thoughts and ideas. Of course the materials and objects we use impact the way people communicate, and it will be great to have some research that goes some way to indicating how some approaches and materials in this area of methods privilege or enable certain aspects over others.