Samuli Mäkinen

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.

Organisational adoption of the lead user method: a follow-up study on intentions versus actions

Users have been shown to be a source of new product ideas, and some users also develop their own solutions. This is not a marginal phenomenon and innovating users - so-called lead users - can be found in all fields. The lead user method (LUM) has several documented advantages, but it has gained far less ground as an everyday approach among companies than more traditional user research methods. In this article, we examine the reasons why LUM is not adopted in an organisation after a successful pilot project. We use rich, longitudinal data from two case companies and find that despite stated intentions and enthusiasm, LUM is not applied repeatedly. Staff turnover, the time and effort required to conduct LUM and the difficulties of adjusting LUM to a specific context were found as reasons why LUM use did not continue. Most importantly, LUM adoption requires the transfer of the evaluative and procedural knowledge of how to conduct it, which appears to be difficult and effortful to transfer to and within the organisation.

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.

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.