Concluding Remarks

Concluding Remarks

Rob Procter1, Mark Hartswood2, Alex Voss1, Roger Slack3, Mark Rouncefield4 and Monika Büscher5

1 National Centre for e-Social Science, University of Manchester, [email protected], [email protected]

2 School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, [email protected]

3 School of Social Sciences, University of Wales at Bangor,

10.1 Introduction

In the face of increasingly powerful and complex ICTs,growing integration and interdependencies betweenservices and organisations, and multifaceted, complexwork processes, effective user-designer relations arecritical if our expectations of ICTs are to be realisedin timely, economic, usable and dependable ways. Usersand designers must seek to work more closely andproductively together if the transformative potential ofnew technologies in use is to be realised. In doing so,however, both users and designers have to face thepractical realities of the settings in which theyoperate, realities that have as much to do with theirpolitical and commercial contexts and the aspirations ofthe organisations creating software products as they dowith the capacity of a given intervention to delivereffective design recommendations.

The chapters in this volume describe and reflect upondifferent ways of managing user-designer relations andthe ways in which new challenges may call for us, as PDpractitioners to move beyond current approaches and

2 Procter, Hartswood, Voss, Slack, Rouncefield and Büscher

invent new ones. In drawing on the practical lessons itscontributors have gleaned from their involvement in arange of projects of different types, we hope that thisvolume will provide a resource for users and designerspracticing or considering participatory design as anapproach.

As we argued in the introductory chapter, we are notlooking for a remedy to the ‘problem’ of user-designerrelations. This would be a futile objective, partlybecause of the specificity of the problems to contextsand, not least, because the backdrop to user-designerrelations is itself constantly shifting. Changes toworking patterns and working arrangements, inter andintra-organisational modes of working, modes oftechnology supply, and the emergence of new technologieswith concomitant possibilities for transforming workingpractices and home life (and new ways of making a profitor a living) provide for a continually shifting terrainfor user-designer relations to populate and adapt to.That is not to say, though, that where the case studiesin this volume highlight difficulties with realisingappropriate user-designer relations to achieve aparticular end (as perspicuously explored in Jenkings’and in Martin et al.’s studies of the UK NHS Connecting forHealth programme) or where approaches or remedies aresuggested, that these are pointless exercises immediatelydated by shifting circumstances and practice. Rather, wewould draw attention to Hyysalo’s point in chapter 6 thatparticular modes of user-designer relations tend to betaken up, dropped and reinstated, sometimes over thevarious phases of a single product’s evolution. With thisin mind, we hope that the case studies in this volumemight provide PD practitioners with an antidote to thetendency noted by Hyysalo for organisationalforgetfulness of the benefits of user engagement.

In this final chapter, we will attempt to summarisethe important insights arising from the chapterspresented in this volume, be frank about what is missing

Concluding Remarks 3

and to formulate questions for use, design and research.We will begin by exploring how we might classify thekinds of user-designer encounters reflected in thechapters.

10.2 A Taxonomy of PD Practices Revisited

In the years since Bowers (1991) first pointed to some ofthe complexities involved in ICT systems design, the‘Janus face’ that necessarily presents itself differentlyto users and designers, continuing research and hard wonexperience have highlighted not just the difficulties andintricacies involved in attending to any one ‘face’, ofunderstanding either the problems of design or theproblems of use, but the necessity and the sheerdifficulty of addressing these issues simultaneously.Perhaps the most important message for readers to takeaway from this volume is that there is no single, bestapproach to effective user-designer relations. This isnot a straightforward message, nor is it easilyimplemented, since we have now moved way beyond simplenotions of ‘configuring the user’ (Woolgar 1991). AsTörpel et al.’s review of PD in chapter 2 has shown, themeaning and practice of PD has evolved as its adherentshave responded to new opportunities and challenges. PDmight now be best described as an ‘eclectic mix’ oftechniques from which practitioners may choose. And, aseach subsequent chapter has demonstrated, in choosing, PDpractitioners must be sensitive to how the variousfactors such as scale, novelty, organisational type, etc.that we might use to define and distinguish projectsmight play out in the context of any given project andadapt their approach to suit, not only when deciding howto begin but also as a project unfolds. This also invitesus to reflect on the relevance of different kinds ofexpertise and knowledge, how user engagement changes overthe course of a project, the impact of different modes oftechnology supply (from bespoke software solutions to


generic packages), the maturity of the technologies, andthe need to orient to commercial and political objectivesand the pressures these exert on organisational members,whether users or designers.

Adapting and expanding the taxonomy of PD practicesdevised by Muller, Wildman and White (1993), we attemptbelow to map the case studies in this volume along anumber of dimensions reflecting both the kinds of userengagement that they embody, the design issues theyimplicate and aspects of the socio-economic circumstancesin which they are set which seem to us to have a bearingon their outcomes.

10.2.1 Context of Engagement

Drawing upon the first of the two principle dimensions ofMuller et al.’s original taxonomy (‘who participates withwhom in what?’), our aim here is to unpack some of thecomplexity associated with the concept of context ofengagement. First, we can distinguish between, on the onehand, designers entering the users’ setting and, on theother, users entering the setting of the designer. Thecase studies in this book document examples of each: usersetting (Jenkings; Büscher et al.; Martin et al.; Voss et al.);designer setting (Bonner; Hyysalo); as well as ones whichspan both (Hyysalo; Pollock and Williams). With theexception of the approach advocated by Voss et al. inchapter 3, the setting for engagement seems to correlatestrongly with the timing of engagement within thesoftware lifecycle. In particular, with the growingrecognition of the value of ethnography, engagement inthe users’ setting has become an increasingly preferredmode for the early phases of requirements gathering. Whatis striking, then, about the approach advocated by Voss etal. is its goal of making the users’ setting the primarycontext for engagement throughout the development cycle.

Second, as in Muller et al.’s original taxonomy, we candistinguish between commercial product development andresearch projects, the significance of that the latter


being that it may more accommodating of ‘experimental’approaches to user engagement. The majority of casestudies in this volume fall into the commercial productdevelopment category (Bonner; Hyysalo; Pollock andWilliams; Martin et al.; Voss et al.), with only one casestudy (Büscher et al.) representing research projects. Finally,we can distinguish between the following types ofapplication setting: organisational working environments(Jenkings; Pollock and Williams; Martin et al.; Voss et al.);and one which we will refer to as domestic environments(Bonner; Hyysalo), whose growing significance is areflection of the expanding market for – and ubiquity of– ICT products and services.

10.2.2 Timing of Engagement

The second of the two principle dimensions of Muller etal.’s taxonomy (‘time during the development lifecycle’),the timing of engagement within the system lifecycle isimportant for the ways in which it may influence the roleof users and their capacity to shape the system beingproduced. Broadly speaking, Muller et al.’s typology dividedthis dimension into three periods – early, middle andlate. In our revised taxonomy, we can equate these with,respectively: requirements gathering (when users have theopportunity to be involved in shaping systemfundamentals, as in Bonner; Büscher et al.; Voss et al.);development (as the system begins to take shape and usershave an opportunity to provide feedback and refine itbefore it is completed, as in Hyysalo; Büscher et al.; Vosset al.); implementation, or ‘localisation’ (as the finishedsystem is deployed and users have an opportunity toinfluence how it is adapted to their needs, as in Martinet al.; Pollock and Williams; Voss et al.) phases of aproject. To these, however, we would add deployment (i.e.,where users have the opportunity to influence how thesystem evolves, as in Voss et al.) and which has typicallybeen ignored as a site of user-designer relations the PDcommunity (as it has also been by software engineering


which relegates it to the unglamorous category of‘maintenance’). The case studies in this book haveillustrated how different techniques for facilitatinguser-designer relations come into their own during thesoftware lifecycle. This questions notions of a status of‘completion’ of technological innovation, and theseparation between design, implementation andappropriation. In our experience, it is unusual to finduser engagement being pursued with equal commitmentthroughout the software lifecycle and this, we feel, is achallenge that the user-designer research community mustaddress.

10.2.3 Scale of Engagement

One of a small number of secondary dimensions in Mulleret al.’s taxonomy, scale of engagement is important forits practical impact. We find examples in this book of:small scale (Bonner; Büscher et al.; Voss et al.); medium scale(Martin et al.; Hyysalo; Voss et al.); and large scale(Jenkings; Pollock and Williams) user engagement,together with clear evidence of the influence of scale ofengagement on the suitability of different techniques. Aswe noted in chapter 1, many of the techniques mostclosely associated with PD do not scale well, if at all,and this situation has not changed significantly sinceMuller et al. devised their taxonomy. It is worth noting,however, that while (as in the NHS project in the chapterby Jenkings) the scale of some projects may be huge whenmeasured by the size of the user population,implementation (as illustrated by Martin et al.’s chapter)is often a local exercise – and hence potentially muchmore manageable and amenable to meaningful userengagement. Perhaps one lesson for those responsible forthe execution of large scale projects is to adopt, wherepossible, technical strategies which maximise the scopefor local satisfying user requirements while remainingconsistent with the overall project aims (e.g., Eason2007).


10.2.4 Primary Purpose of Engagement

Primary purpose is a new dimension which we argue shouldbe factored into the selection of user engagementapproaches. In the case studies, we can distinguishbetween the following: building consensus (Jenkings; Hyysalo(PDMS); Pollock and Williams); informing design (Bonner;Büscher et al.; Voss et al.); informing development (Hyysalo;Büscher et al.; Voss et al.); informing implementation (Martin etal.; Voss et al.). In part, we might argue that thesecategories of engagement purpose are simply a reflectionof the potential (indeed, very likely) asymmetry that isto be found in user-designer relations. Regardless ofwhich ever stance we might take on conflict and powerissues in ICT projects (see Törpel et al., chapter 2), theprospect of users and designers having different agendasand possessing different kinds of expertise cannot beignored. Perhaps the most common example of how thesedifferent agendas make themselves felt is through theways in which ICT projects are commissioned. Part of thereality of being an ‘ordinary’ organisational user is tobe excluded from the making of strategy. ICT projects maytherefore come burdened with a set of requirements overwhich users and designers have little or no control andmust, in their different ways, then make the best of. Fordesigners, in particular, this may be no easy task asthey attempt to translate the project vision into anachievable end product, and deliver it to schedule and onbudget. As a consequence, for the designer, the choice ofuser engagement approach needs to keep a balance betweenimproving the quality of the outcome while ensuring thatits impact on the project remains manageable. We saw inchapter 2 how the MUST approach to PD addresses thisissue by splitting the project into a ‘design’ and an‘implementation’ project, where the design project isprior to commissioning of the full system and informs adecision to build or buy, etc.


10.2.5 User Experience

The rapid expansion of the market for ICT products andservices over the past fifteen years, the consequentimpact on the experience of being a ‘user’ and hence, wewould argue, on the likely character of the user-designerrelationship. In the case studies, we can discern thefollowing kinds of user experience: organisational user(Martin et al.; Jenkings; Pollock and Williams; Voss et al.),reflecting those users who are subject to the dictates oforganisational policies about the timing and form oftechnical change; discretionary user (Bonner; Hyysalo(Wristcare)), reflecting users in the role of consumerswho have a choice over whether or not they will use aparticular system or product (or perhaps which of severalofferings they will choose); and, finally, early adopters(Büscher et al.), users who see themselves as innovatorsand who possess a strong vision of what they wish toaccomplish and so are prepared to significant time andeffort in order to drive a project from beginning to end.

The lesson we would draw from the case studies in thisvolume is simply that designers should be prepared forthe commitment to engagement to reflect the userexperience, and to adapt their expectations andapproaches accordingly. For example, and as borne out bythe findings of Martin et al. and Büscher et al.respectively, it would be surprising if organisationalusers would show the enthusiasm for – and hence beprepared to invest the degree of effort in – engagementthat would be typical of early adopters.

10.2.6 Summary

Our purpose in elaborating this taxonomy has been toattempt to identify and to categorize importantdimensions of user engagement. Of course, any attempt atmapping user-designer relations in this way must besubject to a number of qualifications. First and mostimportantly, as with taxonomies generally, the categories


we have chosen are a compromise, a necessary butnonetheless crude approximation to the messy realities ofprojects. Second, their selection, informed as it is bythe case studies in this volume, may be criticised forbeing incomplete, they may be subject to change (notleast, as the markets for ICT products and servicescontinue to co-evolve with innovations in the technologyitself). Part of the problem is perhaps, as Voss et al.argue, that unlike other software project activities,approaches to user-designer relations are hard to codify.In any case, it should be clear that such a taxonomy canonly go so far in helping the PD practitioner answer thequestion of what kind of user engagement would beappropriate. With this in mind, we now turn tosummarising some of the important themes which we feelthe case studies reflect.

10.3 A Collaborative Endeavour

A question to which anyone with an interest in user-designer relations (as a user or designer) needs to havean answer is ‘how much user engagement is sufficient toget the job done’? For many years, it would seem that theanswer has been ‘more than is being practised at present’which, of course, has been grist to the mill of thegrowing number of academic researchers working in thisfield. From the early 1990s onwards, the ICT designresearch literature has steadily accumulated evidence ofhow studies of work practice and the reflections onprofessional experience of work provide rich input todesign. For many researchers, it has made an irrefutableargument for the ‘turn to the social’ (Grudin 1990;Hughes, King, Rodden and Andersen 1994) and, for some, asTörpel et al., note in chapter 2, it pointed also to gapsin PD practices of that time which needed to beaddressed. Some of these, we argue, persist today andthis message is reinforced in several of the othercontributions in this volume.


Büscher et al.’s chapter emphasises the limits of ‘pre-prepared’ design in ICT applications where it isimpossible to anticipate users’ requirements in each andevery situation. Their message is that creative designand technological potential may lead to the discovery ofan excess of possibilities, more than could ever beexplored by conventional PD approaches. What Büscher etal.’s chapter confirms is that new kinds of ICTapplications are likely to challenge existing techniquesfor, and assumptions about, PD. It seems to us that theonly possible response from the PD community must be tocontinue to be innovative in its practices. Suchinnovation is required, especially in the face ofchallenges of achieving effective engagement with usersin, for example, domestic settings, challenges which haverisen up the agenda of both academic researchers and ofcommercial ICT product developers in recent years(Crabtree and Rodden 2004). Another significant exampleof a gap in current PD practices is its failure to takean interest in deployment and use as a significant locusfor user-designer relations and for the re-design andeven re-invention of ICTs (Williams, Slack and Stewart2005) It is a concern to address this deficiency which iswoven through Voss et al.’s chapter and its argument thatdesigners should be prepared for a ‘long term engagement’with users (Hartswood, Procter, Rouncefield, Slack,Soutter and Voss 2002). As Voss et al. note, thespecificities and possibilities raised through co-realisation (Hartswood, Procter, Rouncefield, Slack,Voss, Büscher and Rouchy 2007) can exceed anything that(a-priori) design can achieve but it too, has itslimitations. The case for acknowledging the‘unknowability’ of the future and for creatingcircumstances which are conducive to its emergence seemsclear but, at the same time, this must be done withoutstepping beyond the limits of a project’s resources.

If design is a matter of making informed choices, itis often also a matter of ‘satisficing’. In chapter 3,


Voss et al. have argued for taking on the challenge ofmeshing ethnography with ICT system design. One importantmessage from their work is that practitioners of thisapproach to PD must grapple with the problems of matchingthe rich and detailed findings with what a project’stechnical staff can accommodate, that is, what they arepractically able to do at any given time. This reminds usthat, for very practical reasons, PD is a collaborativeendeavour, a partnership between users and designers andnot simply, as some more naïve interpretations of thecraft might have it, a matter of putting users ‘incharge’.

It is all too easy for academic researchers tocriticise commercial approaches to user-designerrelations for falling short of some sort of ideal wherethe process is valid, rigorous, where maximum informationis extracted and the best possible design produced, butthis would be to ignore the realities of commercialcontexts where the goal is to produce a competitivedesign using a process that has a high predictability andlow overheads. In Bonner’s chapter, we can see how somesort of alignment is negotiated between these twodiscourses, which is similar in some respects to thesorts of strategies outlined by Pollock and Williams(chapter 9) in keeping different user constituenciesaligned with each other and the company’s genericoffering. In a similar vein, Hyysalo in chapter 6observes how the shutting down by ProWellness of itsengagement with its potential user base was due to theproblems the company was experiencing with “managing thecacophony of opinions”. The lesson from these chapters isthat the modes of user-designer relations become shapedto meet business objectives (and not necessarily in a waythat is always detrimental to end users) that involves a(sometimes considerable) element of managing users andtheir demands.

We would argue that management is a feature of alluser-designer relations, but that, on some occasions and


in some settings, it is more pronounced than at others.It is interesting that academic offerings haveincreasingly focused on an ideal of accessing the skillsof the worker in order to inform better (work affording)designs, and moved away from earlier emancipatory ideals,as Törpel et al. explain in chapter 2. The emphasis hasshifted to how to get at this information, rather than onhelping provide effective strategies for users anddesigners to manage better the demands and expectationsthat each might have of the other and this, we argue, isan imbalance that needs to be addressed in future work.In some senses, the rise of what we might call a‘pragmatist’ participatory design has resulted in theattenuation of some of the ‘idealism’ that, to our minds,was a hallmark of early PD. We suggest that those seekingto deploy PD in the future might shift the balance back.This is another of the messages of co-realisation.

10.4 User Engagement in the Wild

It is difficult to translate ‘utopian’ and research-basedapproaches to user-designer relations into the prevailingsocio-economic context and to related ‘ideological’understandings of what ‘design’ and ‘use’ are, what‘technologies’ are and what their relationship is toexisting practices. This is, as the chapter by Törpel etal. makes very clear, an issue with which PD has grappledover many years. The chapters by Bonner, Hyysalo, Pollockand Williams, Martin et al. and Jenkings put this issueinto a contemporary context and, to some extent, providesome benchmarks as to what can be achieved, as well assome strategies for survival, while being quite honestabout the nature of the challenges and the limitationsthey impose on PD practices. They cover a range ofcontexts and so help us to be sensitised to the differentkinds of tensions that a user or designer might be facedwith and why some user-designer partnerships flourish ‘in


the wild’ (Dittrich, Eriksen and Hansson 2002), whileothers fail.

The chapter by Bonner tells a story of how designersin a commercial setting appropriate and re-fashion userengagement strategies that have their origins inacademia. We learn from Bonner that the ‘organisationalsurvival’ of PD techniques requires that practitioners bealert to the contours of organisational power and beskilled in playing to organisational agendas. In thecommercial world, modes of user-designer relations (andresources they consume) are evaluated against competitiveadvantage they might confer, rather against theirvalidity or rigour. The chapter by Hyysalo reinforcesthis point and helps to provide some arguments for theuse of PD. His study reveals a shifting emphasis betweendifferent sorts of user-designer relations depending oncommercial objectives and, crucially, the ‘forgetting’ ofthe benefits of previous sorts of engagements. Theconclusion can only be that users and designers need tobe prepared not only to make the case for PD but also tokeep on making it over and over again – often in the faceof more managerialist demands. It follows, then, thatpart of our message is that reconfiguring user-designerrelations is the education of those who seek to managecontingencies out of development.

Regarding the use of specific techniques for PD, bothBonner and Jenkings expose how the ability to deliver aneffective PD workshop depends on the skill of thefacilitator and the commitment of the participants asmuch as the props used and the format of the exercise.Such skills may turn on fairly local and specificknowledge: how to deal with this designer or thiscustomer, a point which emphasises again the benefits ofthe ‘long engagement’.

A notable feature of Hyysalo’s study was the genericnature of the software product. This was also a featurewith the case study featured in Pollock and Williams’chapter but differences in the scale of both the systems


and organisations involved led to quite differentapproaches to user-designer relations. In the lattercase, the conduct of user-designer relations is not leftto chance and there is certainly no evidence oforganisational ‘forgetting’. The company management knowsthe stakes are too high for a haphazard approach andtheir response is designed to ensure users’ requirementsare contained within an envelope of what is practical fora generic, high value and complex software product.

The case study in the chapter by Jenkings matches thatof Pollock and Williams in terms of the scale of the endproduct but is more challenging still because of itsmassive potential user base. It also exemplifies some ofthe problems of user engagement in politically driven,public sector ICT projects. In some respects, thesolution Jenkings offers is a technological re-packagingand updating of a well known and well used PD device: themock-up or demonstrator (Kyng 1995). The Animator is atool to help NHS staff imagine the future and itsimplications, and not just technical ones but alsoorganisational. As Jenkings explains, the Animatorevolved from a concrete depiction of an EHR system in useinto a much more conceptually-oriented device designed toinform users about changes and solicit their ‘buy in’ forthe system rather than provide an opportunity formeaningful discussion about the details of itsimplementation. As Jenkings concedes, engagement withusers over the organisational vision is quite differentfrom engagement for the purposes of shaping the concretedetails of its design and implementation but is intendedto supplement other methods and not substitute for them.The Animator was therefore unlikely to have an impact onaspects of the system such as user interfaces, workflow,etc, but it certainly could have shaped the ‘broader’,higher level aspects of the programme if the politicalwill had been there to let it do so. Indeed, it isstriking that the issues that were raised in the Animatorfocus groups were prescient of the sorts of problems that


have since bedevilled the NHS CfH programme. Jenkings’case study exposes the boundaries of user engagement andthus user-designer relations in a large scale,bureaucratic organisation where end-users are separatedby several layers of management from the key decision-making processes. Finally, and once again, Jenkings’ casestudy also demonstrates the influence of ‘organisationalpolitics’ on the survival of an otherwise successfulexercise in user engagement.

The chapter by Martin et al. is of an EPR project teamthat wants to engage users but discovers that finding theusers is hard, and the degree to which they can engagewith them constrained by competing technical concerns. Ina sense, this case study picks up where those of bothJenkings, and Pollock and Williams left off andillustrates how end-users must grapple in theimplementation phase with the consequences of previoususer engagement (or the lack of it). In Martin et al.’s casestudy, the project team constantly battles with theinevitable contingencies of real organisational life and,no matter how committed the project team is to meaningfuluser engagement, this has to compete with the need tokeep the project ‘on track’. We might think of this as anexample of ‘bounded’ user engagement – there is a needfor user engagement but also a need to deliver. There isclearly scope here, however, for some re-thinking of themechanisms employed to support effective user-designerrelations and make them more able to withstand theseorganisational contingencies, which include overcomingvarious sorts of barriers to user involvement. Martin etal. suggest the use of small scale ethnographies that aretimed and targeted, informed through a process oftracking where user participation within a project issucceeding or failing. We will pick up this issue againin the next and final section.


10.5 Taking User-Designer Relations Forward

As with any attempt to cover such a wide area as user-designer relations, we are all too aware of the variousomissions and the disparity of treatments which appear inthis volume. The first omission we would highlightconcerns our under-emphasis on product design, the waydesign processes may be seen from within a company andthe concomitant issues of getting user-designer relationsand usability taken seriously or put onto organisationalagendas that are often dominated by cost-benefitrationalities. Such analyses are available elsewhere(Lindholm, Keinonen and Kiljander 2003), though,certainly, some of the observations made, e.g., “ourexperience has been that the intersection of user needsand the industry interests takes place only after productlaunch” are reflected in the experiences recounted inthis volume. Moreover, many of the insights developed inthis volume are relevant to a product design process thatinvolves the challenge of developing in tandem thephysical as well as the digital experience with products.This co-development presents a dilemma in currentpractice because physical design and interaction designinvolve different knowledge, skills, tools, timelines andwork approaches and consequently user-designer relationsof various kinds become paramount.

Another obvious omission concerns the relative absenceof investigations into user-designer relations ineveryday domestic settings. Bonner’s chapter does lookat design for the home in that it is concerned with thedevelopment of novel cooker interfaces. Similarly,Hyysalo’s study concerned technologies to be used inhomes – but of a distinct kind (managed care settings).In both cases, the approaches fall short of the sorts ofrecommendations made by Edwards and Grinter (2001) inthat involvement of users is still at ‘arms length’ –there is no real commitment by either company to reallyget ‘under the skin’ of home life. For example, in


Bonner’s case study, users are brought into thedesigners’ setting for workshops but the designersthemselves never set foot in a ‘real’ kitchen as a partof their explorations.

Again, many of the conclusions and recommendationsoutlined here would be supported in the domestic sphereas designers in such sensitive settings increasingly turntowards methods that bring them closer to users’aspirations and lives as really lived. This enables themto meet what Edwards and Grinter (2001) identify as themajor challenges for designers: “to pay heed to thestable and compelling routines of the home […] subtle,complex and ill-articulated. Only by grounding ourdesigns in such realities of the home will we have abetter chance to minimise, or at least predict, theeffects of our technologies”. Attention to user-designerrelations in these settings brings design closer to theideal of ‘inclusive design’, which emphasises theimportance of social, human factors in system use. Inthis view, designers recognise that solutions devised onthe basis of inappropriate investigative strategies andtechniques can be debilitating and dis-empowering.Consequently, traditional technological approaches needto be complemented by detailed investigations intoeveryday life and user needs, involving the usersthemselves in the process of investigation andrequirements specification as a feature of co-developmentor ‘co-realisation’ (Hartswood et al. 2007).

Looking beyond these omissions, it seems inevitablethat continuing innovations in ICT products and serviceswill set new challenges for users and designers and thatmeeting these will require the community to continue topush the boundaries of existing approaches and, perhaps,to come up with new ones. Practitioners of user-designerrelations will need to master the trick of being ‘agile’,in other words, of being able to shift strategies toadapt to changing circumstances, including technicalchange – from the perspective both of the demands it


makes on existing user engagement practices andopportunities it affords for experimenting with new ones– without having to ‘re-invent the wheel’ each time,while also being open to devising new forms andmechanisms for user engagement. Practitioners must beable to tap into the organisation’s own experiences ofthe conduct and practice of user-designer relations, aswell as those approaches and methods emerging fromacademic communities, both now and in the future.

At the same time, however, we would also argue thatthere are limits to what being agile can achieve fortaking the practice of user-designer relations forward.In particular, practitioners must also ask themselveswhether they should be content to operate within theestablished parameters for the conduct of user-designerrelations as set by the context in which they work and,if not, the question must be what can be done about this.There is, then, as Voss et al. have argued, a need to createthe space and time for co-realisation. What this can beis, in part, an achievement in the setting – but it isalso a matter of principle. Taking the reconfiguration ofuser-designer relations seriously involves a commitmentfrom all parties.

The relationship between design interventions and thepolitical, commercial and organisation context in whichthey are embedded have been recurrent themes throughoutall of the chapters in this volume, which highlights theimportance of skill and responsiveness to circumstancesbut also makes a strong case for some wider engagement bypractitioners in shaping organisational and socialagendas, that is to be prepared to make the case forimproving user-designer relations higher up withinorganisational decision-making structures. For example,techniques or approaches to user-designer relations thatappear overtly to be exploratory or open-ended, such asethnographically-informed design, are perhaps alwaysgoing to find it hard to gain mainstream commercialacceptance because they do not provide the sorts of


predictability demanded by the calculus of projectmanagement and this is despite the evidence that therisks of applying these approaches are arguably less thanthe risks to the project of not doing so (Shapiro 2005;Kanstrup and Bertlesen 2006). From an ICT projectmanagement perspective, taking user engagement seriouslycan seem to be expensive in terms of resources, may seemunpredictable in terms of producing well defined outputsto a schedule, challenging in that it can privilege ‘shopfloor’ rather than management concerns and, perhaps, evenmobilise resistance to the rationale for undertaking aproject in the first place. On the other hand, notengaging users can lead to systems that don’t fit with orseek to build upon existing practice, may turn out to beunworkable and may even be rejected by users.

Perhaps, however, the case studies in this volumepaint an overly pessimistic picture in that the projectmanagement strategies they documented are notrepresentative of the innovations taking place in thisfield, some of which have clearly been influenced by thechallenges of user engagement and promise a moreresponsive management regime for their conduct. Inparticular, so-called ‘agile’ approaches have becomequite popular as an answer to the rigidities oftraditional, strictly phased methodologies. One of themost notable of these new approaches is extremeprogramming (Beck 1998, 2000). Among its key elements area focus on working code, involving early release andshort release cycles and an incremental planning approachthat allows changes to be made according to evolvingcircumstances and user requirements.

To us, it seems inevitable that something has to giveif user-designer relations are to progress. We arguethat, as PD practitioners, we have a choice: should we becontent with making different sorts of trade-offs orcompromises (such as following the suggestion of Martin etal. above) in order to do what can best be done in thecircumstances or should we seek to influence those


circumstances? Accepting the latter would require us totake seriously the objective of convincing organisationaldecision-makers of the need to accept new priorities inthe commissioning and conduct of ICT projects, ones thatmake fostering effective user-designer relations apriority from the start of a project and would make iteasier to defend them in the face of all the usualproject contingencies.

There are some promising signs that useful strategiesare beginning to emerge which may yet be capable ofbringing about a shift in priorities from those thatprivilege technical considerations to ones which treatuser engagement seriously. For example, drawing onlessons from the NHS CfH programme (and which looks setto be a rich source of arguments for those who argue forthe importance of taking user-designer relations moreseriously), Eason (2007) has advocated a socio-technicalfocus to the introduction of ICT systems in healthcarewhere the pace of implementation is geared more stronglyto users’ capacity to accommodate and contributemeaningfully to a programme of change and innovation,supported by a technical approach that emphasisesbuilding upon what is already in place with discrete andphased implementations. Perhaps most significantly, hehas successfully introduced a ‘socio-technical committee’as part of the project management structure, serving toinstitutionally embed a broad series of socio-technicalconcerns. Similarly, in the MUST approach (Bødker,Kensing and Simonsen 2004) described in Törpel et al.’schapter, user engagement is woven into the fabric of awell-defined project structure much more strongly than isthe case in many other approaches, bringing it to bear onthe structure of a project rather than treating it as anadd-on or a challenge as is often the case in otherapproaches.

With this thought in mind, it seems appropriate thatwe conclude by echoing Suchman (2002) and urge thatpractitioners of user-designer relations heed the


ambition “… that system developers become responsible forlocating themselves within the extended networks ofsociomaterial relations and forms of work that constitutetechnical systems.” That is, we must challenge theexisting and taken-for-granted divisions of labour in thedevelopment of ICTs and the separation that currentlyprevails between the contexts for their development andsubsequent use. It seems to us that this is a way forwardand possibly the difference between user engagement beingpursued as a means to ‘fix things up’, as opposed todealing with problems in the first place.

References

Beck, K. (1998). Extreme Programming: A Humanistic Discipline of Software Development. In Astesiano, E. (Ed.) Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1382, Springer. pp. 1-6.

Beck, K. (2000). Extreme Programming Explained: Embracing Change. Addison Wesley.

Bowers, J. (1991). The Janus Faces of Design: Some Critical Questions for CSCW. In Bowers, J. and Benford, S. (Eds.) Studies in Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Amsterdam, North Holland.

Bødker, K., Kensing, F. and Simonsen, J. (2004). Participatory IT Design. Designing for Business and Workplace Realities. Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

Crabtree, A. and Rodden, T. (2004). Domestic Routines and Design for the Home. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 13(2), April. pp. 191-220.

Dittrich, Y., Eriksen, S. and Hansson, C. (2002). PD in the wild: Evolving practices of design in use. In Proceedings for theParticipatory Design Conference, Malmo, pp 124-34.

Eason, K. (2007). Local sociotechnical system development in the NHS National Programme for Information Technology. Journalof Information Technology. v. 22 pp 257–264.

Edwards, K. and Grinter, R. (2001). At home with ubiquitous computing. In Proceedings of UbiComp. pp 256-272. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.


Grudin, J. (1990). The Computer Reaches Out: The historical continuity of the interface. In Proceedings of the ACM conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Seattle, Washington, pp 261-68.

Hartswood, M., Procter, R., Rouncefield, M, Slack, R., Soutter,J. and Voss, A. (2002). The Benefits of a Long Engagement: Some Critical Comments on Contextual Design. In Proceedings of the 2nd Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Aarhus, October 21st-23rd.

Hartswood, M., Procter, R., Rouncefield, M, Slack, R., Voss, A., Büscher, M. and Rouchy, P. (2007). Co-realisation: Evolving IT Artefacts by Design. In Ackerman, M., Halverson,C., Erickson, T. and Kellogg, W. (Eds.) Resources, Co-Evolution and Artefacts, Springer, pp 59-94.

Hughes, J., King, V., Rodden, T. and Andersen, H. (1994). Moving out of the control room: Ethnography in systems design. In Proceedings of the ACM conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 429-39.

Kanstrup, M. and Bertlesen, P. (2006). Participatory IT-Support. Proceedings of the ninth Participatory Design Conference, Trento, Italy.

Kyng, M. (1995). Making representations work. Special issue of Communications of the ACM, vol 38(9), pp 46–55.

Lindholn, C., Keinonen, T. and Kiljander, H.. (2003). Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed The Face of the Mobile Phone, McGraw-Hill.

Muller, M.J., Wildman, D.M. and White, E.A. (1993). Taxonomy ofPD Practices: A Brief Practitioner’s Guide. Muller, M. and Kuhn, S. (Eds.) Special Issue on Participatory Design, Communications of the ACM, Volume 36, issue 4, June.

Shapiro, D. (2005). Participatory design: the will to succeed. Proceedings of the 4th decennial conference on Critical computing: between sense and sensibility table of contents, pp. 29 – 38.

Suchman, L. (2002). Located accountabilities in technology production. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, vol14(2), pp 91-105.

Williams, R., Slack, R.S. and Stewart, J. (2005). Social Learning inTechnological Innovation: Experimenting with Information and Communication Technologies. Aldershot: Edward Elgar.

Woolgar, S. (1991). Configuring the User: The Case of UsabilityTrials. In J. Law (Ed.), A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology, and Domination. New York: Routledge.

Concluding Remarks

Documents