Pia Helminen

Collaborative futuring with and by makers

Maker spaces and maker activities offering access to low-cost digital fabrication equipment are rapidly proliferating, evolving phenomena at the interface of lay and professional design. They also come in many varieties and change fast, presenting a difficult target for, for instance, public authorities, who would like to cater for them but operate in much slower planning cycles. As part of participatory planning of Helsinki Central Library, we experimented with a form of collaborative futuring with and by makers. By drawing elements from both lead-user workshops and participatory design, we conducted a futuring workshop, which allowed us to engage the local maker communities in identifying the issues relevant for a public maker space in 2020. It further engaged the participants in envisioning a smaller prototype maker space and invited them into realising its activities collaboratively. Our results indicate that particularly the information about future solutions was of high relevance, as was the opportunity to trial and elaborate activities on a rolling basis in the prototype space. Insights about more general trends in making were useful too, but to a lesser extent, and it is likely that these could have been gained just as easily with more traditional means for futuring.

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.

Disabled Persons as Lead Users for Silver Market Customers

It is important to understand user needs when developing new products. User-centered design provides tools for learning about the user needs in question, but studying only the target market customers may result in constricted need data because of the functional fixedness of these customers. The lead user approach, on the other hand, aims to learn from the lead users of a certain target group in order to find better solutions for the needs in the target market. In this chapter, I show through a study on mobile phones how disabled persons can be seen as lead users when developing products for silver market customers. I also present methods for exploring the needs and solutions that disabled users possess.

Redefining User Perception: A Method for Fully Capturing the User Perspective of a Product Concept

When developing new products, it is crucial to consider user needs. The designer is not the user, and thus understanding what users truly need can be difficult. A key for understanding is to comprehend, how the users fundamentally perceive a product. Designer’s and user’s perceptions of a product differ, and with this in mind, we developed and tested a method for capturing user’s and designer’s perspectives of an existing product or service concept. As we tested this Participatory 3D modeling method, we discovered that the user perception of a product concept is not only the opposite of the one of the designer but in fact also much wider. Instead of concentrating on the product itself, the users ended up modeling a coherent whole — their overall experience relating to the product concept.Copyright

Designing user innovation toolkits: exploring the interrelation between solution space and module library

The importance of involving users in the development of products and services is widely noted. Utilizing physical models and representations collaboratively as a means for transferring the “sticky” knowledge from user to developer is a direction many have chosen. Many of these methods, such as design games, probes, and tangible business modeling, share common elements, but the interrelations of these elements are not well understood. The aim of this paper was to explore the interrelation of the module library and the solution space by using a user innovation toolkit in the context of shopping center design. Three different versions of a user innovation toolkit, where the solution space and the content of the module library vary, are created in the form of a “puzzle” containing physical building blocks. This preliminary exploration suggests that in order to ensure that users communicate their own individual needs, both the solution space and the module library should be opened up. Looking into the relationship of the module library and the solution space benefits not only the development of user innovation toolkits but also other methods and techniques commonly used by designers.