A Workshop Method that Involves Users Talking, Doing and Making

This paper discusses a workshop method suitable for use in projects with a participatory design approach. Participatory design is sometimes criticised for focusing too much on what users say. The method described here takes that into account by having users not only talk, but also do acting and make lo-fi prototypes. The method has been used in several different projects. The structure of the workshops is designed to enable the participants to express themselves by talking, doing and making. People express different aspects through different channels and by enabling people to express themselves not only by talking but also by acting and constructing artefacts we create a richer understanding of their needs and desires as well as their context and situation. The method often gives ‘good’ results that are foundations for further design work. Index terms – design process, human centred design, methods and tools for idea generation, cooperative design, participatory design, workshops, prototypes. IntroductIon When Edvin Land photographed his three year old daughter in Santa Fe 1943, she wanted to see the picture right away. Edvin knew how the technology worked and when he was going to start to explain to his daughter why her wish could not come true, he realised that he actually knew enough to make it work. In a couple of hours Edvin had made sketches of how to create a picture directly in the camera. This idea became a product that was sold a few years later under the name of Polaroid Land Camera. This incident shows several different aspects that I will deal with in this paper. One of the most important ones is the daughter’s desire of use. The strong connection to her concrete situation is one of the key factors in making the final product regarded as meaningful. Her desire coincided with many other people’s desire. Emphasizing this fact when marketing the product contributed to its success. Edvin Land’s deep knowledge was important and allowed him to quickly construct the idea and an explanation. More important is that he used this knowledge in a creative and not restricting way. The fact that he worked at Polaroid and could influence the production is naturally also important. To conclude, you could say that thanks to Edvin’s attention to his daughter’s desire and his own knowledge together with reasonable judgements lead to the development of a good idea. Background This paper discusses a workshop method that utilises the important aspects of the story above. The idea Edvin used was created in an authentic situation but usually we designers have to deliberately create ideas and the method described in this paper helps to make them successful. The method is suitable for use in projects with a participatory design approach. Participatory design is sometimes criticised for focusing too much on what users say. The method described here takes this critisism into account by having users not only talk, but also do acting and make lo-fi prototypes. At CID (the Centre for User Oriented IT-design at The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm) several series of workshops has been conducted in different kinds of projects [12, 14]. The workshops were used to create design ideas and to acquire understanding of presumptive users’ needs and desires [8]. The different projects have involved families, distributed workers, people with different kinds of disabilities, elderly people and their caretakers. In most of these projects the workshop method has been one of several methods used to construct knowledge of the design space, i.e. possible meaningful solutions [13]. Over a period of six years well over 30 workshops have been conducted, each with 10-25 participants and lasting around five hours. The workshops all had a similar structure designed to enable the participants to express themselves by saying, doing and making. The assumption behind this is that we humans A Workshop Method that Involves Users Talking, Doing and Making