Mikael Johnson

Virtual Consumerism: Case Habbo Hotel

Selling virtual items for real money is increasingly being used as a revenue model in games and other online services. To some parents and authorities, this has been a shock: previously innocuous ‘consumption games’ suddenly seem to be enticing players into giving away their money for nothing. In this article, we examine the phenomenon from a sociological perspective, aiming to understand how some media representations come to be perceived as ‘virtual commodities’, what motivations individuals have for spending money on these commodities, and how the resulting ‘virtual consumerism’ relates to consumer culture at large. The discussion is based on a study of everyday practices and culture in Habbo Hotel, a popular massively-multiuser online environment permeated with virtual items. Our results suggest that virtual commodities can act in essentially the same social roles as material goods, leading us to ask whether ecologically sustainable virtual consumption could be a substitute to material consumerism in the future.

The managed prosumer: evolving knowledge strategies in the design of information infrastructures

This paper contributes to the reworking of the traditional concepts and methods of Science and Technology Studies that is necessary in order to analyse the development and use of social media and other emerging information infrastructures (IIs). Through long-term studies of the development of two contrasting IIs, the paper examines the prosumer-management strategies by which vendors manage their relationships with their diverse users. Despite the sharp differences between our cases – an online-game with social network features and traditional enterprise systems – we find striking homologies in the ways vendors manage the tensions underpinning the design and development of mass-market products. Thus their knowledge infrastructures – the set of tools and instruments through which vendors maintain an adequate understanding of their multiple users – change in the face of competing exigencies. Market expansion may favour ‘efficient’ quantitative user assessment methods and the construction of abstract user categories for designing new generic solutions and services around market segments. However where a product extends into new and unfamiliar user markets the growing social distance between developer and user may call for ‘richer’ direct ways of knowing the user. We note the emergence of collective fora, which can provide a space for independent action and innovation by users. However, these were managed communities. Certain user relations functions were pushed out to the community or third-party organizations and at other times pulled back in-house – for example, to increase vendor direct control. This picture is far removed from the visions of seamless integration of producers and users encouraged by notions such as prosumer.

INTERMEDIATE SEARCH ELEMENTS AND METHOD COMBINATION IN LEAD-USER SEARCHES

Users play an increasingly important role in product and service innovation. Finding the right users can require substantial search effort. Network searches are increasingly popular in searching for rare lead users. In these searches, implicit and inexact referrals have been found to comprise a substantial number of network referrals; numbers as high as 70% of the most important referrals to sought people have been reported. To aid handling such referrals during network searches, we explicate their status as intermediate referral types, and how these referral types relate to known search methods. The constraints set by intermediate referrals could potentially be overcome and their potential be capitalized through more extensive method combination in network searches than has been trialed to date. We proceed to offer a proof of concept for such searches through documenting how we ran them in four realworld searches and chart future research avenues.

The user as relational entity: Options that deeper insight into user representations opens for human-centered design

Purpose – “User” is the lingua franca term used across IT design, often critiqued for giving a reductionist portrayal of the human relationship with technologies. The purpose of this paper is to argue that equating “user” with flesh and blood “people out there” is naive. Not only that, it closes important options in conducting human-centered design. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conceptually elaborate a relational understanding of the user and integrate research findings on user representations found at the intersection of human-centered design and social studies of technology. Findings – The user is best understood as a relational term that bridges between people out there and renditions of them relevant for design. A distinction between “user representations” and “engaged use” is a key distinction to clarify this further. Research to date demonstrates that R & D organizations have a wide range of user representations and positioning human-centered design to these would advance its likely yie...

Ecologies of user knowledge: linking user insight in organisations to specific projects

ABSTRACT Failure to meet user preferences continues to prevail as a major reason for innovation project failure despite wide arrays of methods and methodologies available for addressing it. The user research and user insight availability problem appears to have become replaced by a method and insight adequacy problem. This calls for the means to better address how organisations and project teams know their users, and how this knowing is intertwined in other organisational processes. A research challenge lies in developing representational templates that are both specific enough for addressing explicit and implicit user insight and encompassing enough for linking these to the relevant project and organisational issues. We develop such a representational template based on ecologies of knowledge mapping and discuss its potential through applying it to a comparative study on two social media web service projects of the Finnish National Broadcasting Company.