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and a number of work environment features. This contrasted to the original work of the design engineers, which primarily focused on piping and layout of the technical components. The use scenarios explored the new production system as a result of the design process in the layout game workshops. The set-up of the scenarios was a mixture of two main media for simulation (Daniellou, 2006): Experimental simulation based on a prototype and a narrative simulation where participants built up an oral account of feasible ways of carrying out the future tasks. The use scenario with incidence cards proved to be a collaborative inquiry of the characteristics of the new production system adding to the script. Playing the scenarios revealed the difference between the employees’ tasks and their conduct (Daniellou, 2005). The employees were not talking and reflecting about their formal tasks. They were talking about the difficulties they could foresee in the new production system and were thinking aloud about how to deal with these problems. By reflecting on the feasibility of conduct, a lot of factors were identified, factors that the design engineers and the production manager had not considered in the design of the new system. 6. Conclusion How could the WSD workshops contribute to the process of transforming a script? Instead of working with representations of users, the designers were collaborating with the actual future operators of the facility in the WSD workshops. Seen from a social learning perspective, the workshops contributed to set up a temporary learning space in which the daily power relations, expert roles and decision-making processes receded. The WSD team set up the rules for the workshops which all participants were to stick to. By the design games the WSD team facilitated the meeting and initiated mutual learning processes between these actors. The game board and the pieces, the scale model and the tape markings in the production hall were operating as appropriate ‘boundary objects’ (Wenger, 2000), allowing usable connections between different work practices. The workshop rules and these artefacts enabled multiple practices to initiate a collaborative design process because the artefacts could be comprehended and interpreted by all participants. The abstract term of “learning space” even became very tangible when we experienced the power of setting up the use scenarios in the actual production hall. An operator stated: It is really a good idea to bring people from different departments together in a room with sufficient time to discuss design and layout indepth. And the icing of the cake was to be situated in the actual production hall instead of a meeting room. The design engineers, one of them a little bit reluctantly, also recognized the effect of the workshops. One of them stated: The starting point was to optimize the piping. Quite other things are now in focus, and the facility will look very different than designed from the beginning. Acknowledgements The Workspace Design research program is partially funded by the Danish Work Environment Research Fund.
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