No. 1 Engaging the Users in Multidisciplinary Projects -How to find them -What to do with them -And where to go next Torben Elgaard Jensen Professor Presentation for the conference on ‘Opportunities and Challenges in Interdisciplinary Research, London, Oct 9 th 2012.
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No. 1 Engaging the Users in Multidisciplinary Projects -How to find them -What to do with them -And where to go next Torben Elgaard Jensen Professor Presentation.
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No. 1
Engaging the Users in Multidisciplinary Projects-How to find them-What to do with them-And where to go next
Torben Elgaard JensenProfessor
Presentation for the conference on ‘Opportunities and Challenges in Interdisciplinary Research, London, Oct 9 th 2012.
No. 2
The problem
”Working in a multi-disciplinary team, I am finding myself acting as a mediator between social and natural sciences, and users and the academia”.
(Anna Krzywoszynska, Solar Energy for Future Societies)
User-driven Innovation programme in Denmark 2007-
-55 mio €, +100 projects
-Connecting the understanding of users in social sciences with technical-natural sciences
-Connecting universities with private sector and municipalities.
-My research: comparative qualitative studies of projects
No. 3
Provide vocabulary for user engagement in multidisciplinary projects
• How to find users• What to do with them• And where to go next
Purpose of this talk
No. 4
How to find the users
1. Business Anthropology – discovering unacknowledged needs
2. Lead user process – tapping into the creativity of users
3. Participatory design- Collaborating with users
No. 5
1. A similarity in methods
(observation, photo, interviews, workshops)
2. Leading to a similar excess of material…
3. Leading to at least three strikingly different ’preservation strategies’.
• Design briefs• Concepts of everyday life• Demonstrations
What to do with the users? Looking inside the projects
No. 6
User statement
Excerpt from a study
Nurse statement
Photo
Preservation strategy 1: Design briefs
No. 7
Definition
Relation to other rationalities
Examples and illustrations
EconomyTime
LogisticsHealthEthics
SocialityPleasure
Preservation strategy 2: Concepts of everyday life
No. 8
”Users”
Props
Home turf
Researchers
Video-camera
Preservation strategy 3: Demonstrations
No. 9
Design Briefs: information from and about users is presented as support for particular design ideas.
Concepts of everyday life: information from and about users is summed up in a network of concepts describing the durable structures of everyday life, which the designers of future solutions should take into account.
Demonstrations (Rehearsing the future): Practical scenario are developed in a previous workshop. The users rehearse these scenerios on location, and their enactment of how something ’might work’ is wittnessed and recorded.
Preservation stategies
No. 10
Projects as machines ?
Project synergy ?
Boundary objects (Star & Griesemer 1989)
Trading zones (Galison 1997)
Collateral benefits (Jespersen et al, forthcoming)
Where to go next ? - or what to expect
No. 11
The ebbs and flows of projects?
Complexify
Simplify
Pre Early Late Post
Project
‘preservation of users’
Defining ‘the’ technology
Technology
Users
Enga
ging
the
user
s’
No. 12
The devil is in the details: Everything in interdisciplinary projects hinges on assumptions about users and technologies, and on the arrangements and preservation styles that allow us to get these things in and out of interdisciplinary projects.
And the devil is interdisciplinary: Our world consists of wildly complex systems such as the energy system. These systems are based on contributions from a range of discilines - math, economics, physics, social science. If we want to wrestle with the problems of these ’interdisciplinary’ systems, we also have to take an interdisciplinary approach.
Conclusions: Interdisciplinarity is the problem as well as the answer