Christian Dindler

Mission from Mars: a method for exploring user requirements for children in a narrative space

In this paper a particular design method is propagated as a supplement to existing descriptive approaches to current practice studies especially suitable for gathering requirements for the design of childrens technology. The Mission from Mars method was applied during the design of an electronic school bag (eBag). The three-hour collaborative session provides a first-hand insight into childrens practice in a fun and intriguing way. The method is proposed as a supplement to existing descriptive design methods for interaction design and children.

Fictional Inquiry—design collaboration in a shared narrative space

In this paper we present Fictional Inquiry, a collaborative Participatory Design technique that provides an approach that allows designers to shape the context of collaborative design activities. Fictional Inquiry allows designers to address specific issues when inquiring into existing use practices, or exploring the future in the collaborative design process. Fictional Inquiry entails bypassing existing socio-cultural structures by creating partially fictional situations, artifacts, and narratives that mediate collaborative design activities. In this paper we present the Fictional Inquiry technique through three cases that highlight the applicability of the technique when staging the design situation, evoking ideas for possible futures, and initiating organizational change. We present a general framework for understanding and staging Fictional Inquiry, and provide an account of how Fictional Inquiry was used in three quite different design situations.

eBag: a ubiquitous Web infrastructure for nomadic learning

This paper describes the eBag infrastructure, which is a generic infrastructure inspired from work with school children who could benefit from a electronic schoolbag for collaborative handling of their digital material. The eBag infrastructure is utilizing the Context-aware HyCon framework and collaborative web services based on WebDAV. A ubiquitous login and logout mechanism has been built based on BlueTooth sensor networks. The eBag infrastructure has been tried out in field tests with school kids. In this paper we discuss experiences and design issues for ubiquitous Web integration in interactive school environments with multiple interactive whiteboards and workstations. This includes proposals for specialized and adaptive XLink structures for organizing school materials as well as issues in login/logout based on proximity of different display surfaces.

Impediments to user gains: experiences from a critical participatory design project

Actual studies of user gains from involvement in design processes are few, although a concern for user gains is a core characteristic of participatory design (PD). We explore the question of user gains through a retrospective evaluation of a critical PD project. We conducted ten qualitative interviews with participants in a project aimed at developing technology to foster engaging museum experiences and rethinking cultural heritage communication. Despite the use of established PD techniques by experienced PD practitioners, a significant number of frustrations relating to the PD process were prominent in the study. Based on these findings, we provide an analysis of impediments to user gains in PD projects in terms of unresolved differences between aims, absence of a clear set-up for collaboration, and different conceptions of technology.

Understanding the dynamics of engaging interaction in public spaces

We present an analysis of three interactive installations in public spaces, in terms of their support of engagement as an evolving process. In particular, we focus on how engagement unfolds as a dynamic process that may be understood in terms of evolving relations between cultural, physical, content-related, and social elements of interactive environments. These elements are explored through the literature on engagement with interaction design, and it is argued that, although valuable contributions have been made towards understanding engagement with interactive environments, the ways in which engagement unfolds as a dynamic process remains relatively unexplored. We propose that we may understand engagement as a product of the four above-mentioned elements, and in our analysis we provide concrete examples of how engagement plays out in practice by analyzing the emergence, transformation and relations between these elements.

Staging imaginative places for participatory prototyping

When we stage participatory prototyping, we arrange constraints and possibilities and envision a place of co-creation for designers and users. We argue that the activity of participatory prototyping can benefit from unfolding in imaginative places that are radically distant from the places of current practice. Our work with participatory prototyping indicates that a radicalisation towards an imaginative place of co-creation provides participants with an extended space for imagining future practices. Departing from the Scandinavian participatory prototyping heritage, our research is an inquiry into staging the places of participatory prototyping. Staging imaginative places is carried out by a careful selection and coordination of anchoring elements that maintain references to current practice and elements of transcendence that afford the imaginative place. As such, we supplement the qualities of the prototype and the process of prototyping with a concern for the place in which prototyping unfolds. We present two cases of participatory prototyping sessions that outline our work with staging imaginative places for participatory prototyping.

Sustaining participatory design initiatives

While many participatory design (PD) projects succeed in establishing new organisational initiatives or creating technology that is attuned to the people affected, the issue of how such results are sustained after the project ends remains an important challenge. We explore the challenge of sustaining PD initiatives beyond the individual project and discuss implications for PD practice. First, based on current PD literature, we distinguish between four ideal typical forms of sustainability: maintaining, scaling, replicating and evolving. Second, we demonstrate from a case study how these various forms of sustainability may be pursued in PD practice and how they can become a resource in reflecting on PD activities. Finally, we discuss implications for PD practice, suggesting that a nuanced conception of sustainability and how it may relate to PD practice are useful resources for designers and researchers before, during and after design processes.

Tying Knots: Participatory Infrastructuring at Work

Today, most design projects are infrastructuring projects, because they build on technologies, competencies and practices that already exist. While infrastructuring was originally seen as being full of conflicts and contradictions with what is already present, we find that many contemporary reports seem to mainly address participatory infrastructuring as horizontal co-design and local, mutual learning processes in which people attempt to make the most out of available technology. In this paper we expand our view of design activities in three dimensions: First, how participatory processes play out vertically in different political and practical arenas; second, on the back stage of design, the messy activities that occur before, between and after the participatory workshops. And third, on their reach; how they tie into existing networks across organizations, and how agency and initiatives become dispersed within these networks. To illustrate and discuss the process of participatory infrastructuring we use a case study from an educational context. This particular project contains a diverse set of design activities at many organizational levels revolving around technology, decision-making, competence-building, commitment and policy-making. The project highlights these complexities, and our discussions lead to a vocabulary for participatory infrastructuring that focuses on knotworking, rather than structure, and on both horizontal and vertical reach and sustainability. This vocabulary is grounded in the meeting of the literature on infrastructuring, participatory design, and activity theory, and leads to a revised understanding of, for example, learning and conflicts in participatory infrastructuring.

Participatory design at the museum: inquiring into children's everyday engagement in cultural heritage

We address the challenge of creating intersections between childrens everyday engagement and museum exhibitions. Specifically, we propose an approach to participatory design inquiry where childrens everyday engagement is taken as the point of departure. We base our discussion on a design workshop -- Gaming the Museum -- where a primary school class was invited to participate in exploring future exhibition spaces for a museum, based on their everyday use of computer games and online communities. We reflect on the results of the workshop, and broadly discuss the everyday engagement of children as point of departure for designing interactive museum exhibitions.

Relational expertise in participatory design

This paper positions relation expertise as a core competence in participatory design. It is an expertise that demands the participatory designer to stimulate the emergence of loosely coupled knotworks, and obtain symbiotic agreement between participants disregarding their professional and social status. We illustrate our theoretical argument for a relational expertise with a running example from a participatory design process engaging an interprofessional group of participants in a project on future technology enabled learning environments.