P for pragmatic: A note relating to Beck’s concern for work place democracy, arguing for IT design skills to become part of public education

It is argued that both the demand on professional IT designers to be able to live democracy and the demand on IT end users to be able to design presents a challenge to the public educational system: IT design skills have to become part of the common standard curriculum

Scenarios as springboards in design of CSCW

Our point of departure is that the relationship between social science, cooperative working and technology is not as much a matter of differences in understanding, as it is a matter of how to accomplish change. This chapter outlines an approach to design of CSCW where change is addressed in terms of ''expansion of the work practice''. To facilitate the change process as a process of expansion, scenarios are used as springboards. Creation and use of scenarios are supported by a conceptual ''toolbox''. The foundation for this toolbox is an understanding of the design process as ``abductive thinking'' consisting of idea generation and systematic reflection, and an understanding of design tools inspired from activity theory. As design processes may involve different communities of practice, we discuss the role of scenarios as boundary objects

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