Tone Bratteteig

Disentangling power and decision-making in participatory design

This paper uses the example of a participatory design project in support of urban planning to analyse the complexity of design decisions. A set of design decisions is described and discussed, showing who made decisions on what. We discuss big decisions and small decisions, decisions internal to the project and related to the outside world, and decisions that might be called non-decisions. A conceptual framework on power is applied for understanding decision-making, power and conflict in Participatory Design projects. We discuss the concept of power, making distinctions between sources of power (among them expert knowledge, resource allocation, values, and interpretations); as well as between various mechanisms guiding decision-making: power, influence, trust and seeking understanding.

Moving Healthcare to the Home: The Work to Make Homecare Work

The paper discusses the work of care recipients, informal caregivers, and the larger networks that are involved in homecare work. It discusses different kinds of work, and also if all the tasks involved in homecare could and should be labeled work. Finally, the paper looks into what kinds of work is delegated to machines and how this affects the work performed by people. One of the main conclusions from this analysis is that seeing the many different kinds of work that go into making homecare work is a good basis for designing alternative solutions.

Spaces for participatory creativity

This article compares participatory workshops with novel mixed-reality tabletop tools in three different urban projects. It discusses differences of site and project, the role of representations, and the role of the participating stakeholders as factors that are crucial in shaping the space for design ideas. The article then draws conclusions as to the salient aspects of creative, explorative and imaginative exploration.

Methods That Matter in Digital Design Research

Theories and analytical perspectives are linked to methods. The discussion of the methods used to capture the complexities of practices with a focus on social, cultural and economic layers (Jordan and Henderson 1994; Wagner 1994; Sjoberg 1996; Newman 1998) represents an important resource for a discussion of designers’ interpretative work with both traditional and new experimental methods. In previous chapters we have described our collaborative and multidisciplinary perspectives that are also mirrored in the methods we use in the exploration of practices. These practices are technical, organizational, knowledge-based and socio-cultural. Our aim is to explore and maintain the complexity in design as a mix of all of these.

Unpacking the Notion of Participation in Participatory Design

The paper explores what exactly it is that users participate in when being involved in participatory design (PD), relating this discussion to the CSCW perspective on collaborative design work. We argue that a focus on decision-making in design is necessary for understanding participation in design. Referring to Schön we see design as involving creating choices, selecting among them, concretizing choices and evaluating the choices. We discuss how these kinds of activities have played out in four PD projects that we have participated in. Furthermore, we show that the decisions are interlinked, and discuss the notion of decision linkages. We emphasize the design result as the most important part of PD. Finally, participation is discussed as the sharing of power, asking what the perspective of power and decision-making adds to the understanding of design practices.

Computers — Utensils or epaulets? The application perspective revisited

This paper is a discussion about how the Application Perspective works in practice.1 We talk about values and attitudes to system development and computer systems, and we illustrate how they have been carried out in practice by examples from the Florence project.2 The metaphors ‘utensil’ and ‘epaulet’ refer to questions about how we conceive the computer system we are to design in the system development process. Our experience is that, in the scientific community, technical challenges mean making computer systems that may be characterised as ‘epaulets’: they have technical, fancy features, but are not particularly useful. Making small, simple, but useful computer systems, more like ‘utensils’, does not give as much credit even if the development process may be just as challenging.

Research Practices in Digital Design

In the twenty-first century, we are literally surrounded by digital things and things that turn out to be digital – or have some digital parts or are parts of a larger system in which there are digital elements. We carry around mobile phones and watches; many also have additional music players, PDAs or PCs. We live in houses filled with digital networks and artefacts; we depend on infrastructures that are partly digital and have digital systems attached to them; we use public and private services that are digital, are based on digital infrastructures and have other digital systems attached to them; and we experience embedded, ubiquitous computing as we live in digitally enhanced environments that support our activities with or without our conscious control. The digital layer(s) in the world constitute a real world.

Bringing Gender Issues to Technology Design

This chapter discusses gender issues in design of information technology: are there gender issues, and what could they be? It is relatively easy to apply a gender perspective to the result of design: the artifact. Artifacts are designed to communicate with gender stereotypes in contemporary society (including stereotypes of work). Applying gender perspectives to artifacts is not very different from other kinds of social analysis of use activities or artifacts in context. Applying a gender perspective to the design process is more difficult. Some aspects of design can, however, benefit from such analysis: the ideas and visions that guide the design process come from someone who has gender. I do not claim that women software designers always design different software from their male colleagues. However, the design process will benefit from having different sets of experiences as a basis for ideas and visions. These ideas were presented in a plenary lecture at ifu.

Organizing the redesign process in system development

This article discusses the notion of redesign and identifies three dilemmas related to post implementation change of information systems. The dilemmas are 1) system development aims at designing stable computer systems for changing environments; 2) the activities requiring most time and effort are based on the weakest planning and organization; 3) despite the volume of user-initiated system changes, user participation is not on the agenda in redesign activities. These dilemmas are grounded in literature and case studies. One way of organizing redesign called Version Projects, and a participatory technique, called Priority Workshops are proposed as means to address the dilemmas.

Design and Interaction in a Smart Gym: Cognitive and Bodily Mastering

Being physically active is perhaps the most important factor influencing the health of elderly people. As a consequence, technologies that support and encourage physical activity have been developed. In this paper, we study a “smart gym” in a residential care building. Our findings indicate that the “smart gym” does not address the complexities of exercise for an elderly person: in order to exercise one has to master the gym equipment and its technology, cognitively as well as bodily. Both the equipment and the smart technology turn out to be difficult to master by its elderly users. Our study reports these difficulties and suggests a more nuanced concept of mastery as a way to address the challenges in designing for elderly users. We unfold physical and bodily dimensions of mastery and consider how these differ between individuals, and within the context and situation.