Selecting and evoking innovators:combining democracy and creativity

The practical undertaking of selecting users to work as innovators and of evoking their creative potential is crucial, but underexposed in the literature on user involvement in design. This paper reports findings from a recent case of user-driven innovation, the FEEDBACK-project, where the authors prepared for and conducted selection of and collaboration with innovators. The outcome was successful in the sense that the innovators produced excellent foundation for conceptual interaction design by creating mock-ups and explanations incarnating their preferences, attitudes and habits. By referring to theories of learning we try to explain how our way of working with selection and evoking of innovators has contributed to this positive result and how our approach to user-driven innovation can be regarded as a way to combine democracy and creativity in design. Author Keywords User-driven innovation, selection and evoking processes

User prototypes as partly unconscious communication - Understanding young diabetics' visions for mobile diabetes technology

In this paper, we introduce user prototypes as a technique that supports users’ articulation of emotions relevant for design: dreams, fears, motivations – their feelings and aspirations. Following Bateson’s writings about communication through art, we consider user prototypes as “partly unconscious communication” and propose to analyze them by focusing on the emotional articulations integrated in the users’ design language. We illustrate this with an example from a design research project on designing learning technology for young diabetics. The example shows how young people with diabetes can express emotional themes related to youth identity, the burden of being young with a chronic illness, and the need to be connected and feel safe through design of prototypes. The new conceptual space that arises from user prototypes shows potential for addressing emotions when designing for health and for further development of the technique user prototypes

DHRS 2009 Proceedings of the Ninth Danish Human-Computer Interaction Research Symposium.

Since 2001 the annual Danish Human-Computer Interaction Research Symposium has been a platform for networking, and provided an opportunity to get an overview across the various parts of the Danish HCI research scene. This years symposium was held in Aarhus, Denmark on December 14, 200