User Centered Design in Practice - Problems and Possibilities

they together with the engineers evaluated different designs and sketched new interfaces.
We spent two months in this way ’playing’ with the new product, deliberately softening
the borders between the expertise of the different groups involved. The results were
good. In a relatively short period of time we had been able to surface concerns with
respect to e.g. injection molding or assembly that has earlier distorted similar conceptual
design (for a general treatment of this theme see end (Buur & Andreasen 1989)). The cost
was that some suggestions had to be given up, but the fact that e.g. the manufacturing
people had also been involved in discussions with the users meant that the design we
finally went for, came out almost unaltered in the end.
Workshops throughout the development process
Beyond reaching out for collaboration with the engineering team and the users in the
conceptual phase we see also a need for keeping users involved during the more detailed
engineering phase. Particularly in larger development projects options and constraints
tend to pop-up continuously all the way through to manufacturing. In these projects we
have argued for a continuos involvement of the users, and we find the workshop format
useful for bringing together users and engineering team. In a large development project on
a new series of water hydraulic components a group of machine manufacturers and endusers
from the food industry were invited to follow and take part in the detailed
engineering of the new product program. The group participated in four full-day
workshops over a one-year period. Our role was to facilitate the process and find suitable
representations of the on-going design (Brandt & Binder 1997). Two things came out of
this process that has later become part of user centered design ’repertoire of resources’.
First we found that stretching the conventional representations of design work was both
necessary and possible. In engineering design most design representations are directed
inwards towards people with the same competency, but in order to engage in dialogue
with other groups, design suggestions has to have a richness that makes it possible to
span the gap between the concerns of different groups. We found wooden mock-ups to
be particularly useful in this project, and learned to use the mock-ups as shared anchoring
points for the dialogue between users and engineers (E. Brandt 1998). The second thing
we learned was that the workshop sessions were as highly valued for the internal
coherence it created in the engineering team as for the input it provided from outside. In
development projects the collaboration between many different competencies seems to call
for a type of dialogue internally that is basically not unlike the dialogue between users and
designers (Binder & Nielsen 1996).
Working with ’rich design materials’ in-between decision
points
When trying to overcome the apparent isolation of our HMI-competency by becoming
more full-blown players in the staging of product development activities, we had to give
up our exclusive right to interpret the ‘voice of the user’. Further more we had to find a
way to position the type of activities we engage in, with respect to the more formal
38 (85) CID-40 • User Centered Design in Practice