Empathic and Participatory Research for the Development of We-Centric Services for a Police Organization

The aim of the project that underlies this paper is to advance our understanding of wecentric ICT services. Such services are meant to support people who work, communicate and cooperate in dynamic groups. An exploration of the qualities of such services yields delicate questions about for example group membership, social appropriateness, dynamic tasks, control and privacy. These questions need to be addressed based on a thorough understanding of people’s daily lives. To that end we propose an approach characterized by empathy for end-users and participation of end-users. This approach was applied practically in fieldwork in cooperation with a police organization, with the goal of identifying problems which police officers encounter and which may be solved with we-centric services. The main research question of this paper is on the process level: What happens when you apply an empathic and participatory approach in developing and evaluating we-centric services together with police officers?