Co-operative Design — perspectives on 20 years with ‘the Scandinavian IT Design Model’

Introduction The authors were all involved in the 'seminal' Utopia project, 1981-85, where Cooperative Design methodology, involving users very early in the design process, had an early development and application in the use of computers. One strong goal was to 'give the end users a voice' in design and development of computer support in work places, thus enhancing the quality of the resulting system. The 'secondary result' of Utopia, the methodology, with ingredients such as low-tech prototyping, early design sessions with users etc, has had great impact on IT design in general. This is the case not only where the methods are a main ingredient as in Cooperative Design and in Participatory Design, but also as part of now common practices in HCI and in CSCW in general and in later methodologies such as Consensus Participation, Contextual Design and Cooperative Inquiry. Thus the obvious idea to involve the users as early as possible in systems and interface design, using low and high tech prototypes, has become a standard to which most developers pay at least lip service. That it is not necessarily followed in practise is usually because of time constraints and lack of insight rather than ill-will, but there are also inherent difficulties. In Utopia and in further Cooperative Design practise we have met important concerns not taken into account in the original Utopia work. In our 20-year practical experience from several design and development projects we have gained insight and found methods to deal with these concerns, not always solving but at least relieving the problems.