Approaches to sustained interaction between design of technical artifacts and sites of use

This workshop invites people interested in developing approaches that enable ongoing and sustainable connections between the design of technical artifacts (be they products or services) and the sites of use. We invite people who are directly involved in creating new technologies but have a strong ethnographic and user research affinity, as well as ethnographers and user researchers with a desire to embrace technical constraints and opportunities that drive innovation.

The world of technology development has come a long way in realizing the value of research about and with intended users of new products and services. The success of design, development and marketing efforts is clearly tied to understanding users and use situations. While user experience researchers are likely today to be involved earlier in product design and development, they often are positioned as providing a service and rarely work side by side with developers and engineers in product teams. Instead information about users and use situations is provided to these engineering teams through meetings, workshops, or written reports supported by a variety of representational artifacts (e.g. scenarios, personas, user requirement documents). This division of labor causes problems of timing the hand-over of knowledge and bridging different languages, reward structures and professional and organizational goals.

Such strict divisions of labor also creates a separation between the sites of intended use and the sites of technology innovation and development, reducing the chance for learning from the use situation and missing opportunities for innovation that could result from closer interaction between sites of use and sites where technology gets built.

Over the years approaches have been developed for creating the organizational and work contexts for sustained interaction from technology conception to design, develop and adoption (e.g. Xerox PARC, Aarhus University, Malmo University, Southern Denmark University, ITU and Kraka to name a few). However, it has been difficult to embed these approaches in the corporate sites of technology production where too often user researchers work in organizational separation from engineering and product design. We envision a radically different relationships been ethnographic research and technology design and development, where there is a closer coupling between technical and ethnographic expertise.

This workshop provide a forum for sharing experiences about challenges, obstacles, techniques, and tools for connecting technology design and development with the site of use. It will be important to understand how different project settings call for different strategies; and we would all benefit from a kind of taxonomy of projects, derived from our experience with successful as well as problematic attempts to establish close and committed collaboration across the professional boundaries of user research and technology design and development.

Participants are requested to submit position papers in which they briefly, but concretely, describe at least one project they would like to bring in to the discussion. Those participants who have submitted position papers will be given 5 minutes to provide brief overview of the projects. The Workshop organizers will review the project briefs and propose an initial framework to aid the discussion.