No. 1

Engaging the Users in Multidisciplinary Projects-How to find them-What to do with them-And where to go next

Torben Elgaard JensenProfessor

Presentation for the conference on ‘Opportunities and Challenges in Interdisciplinary Research, London, Oct 9 th 2012.

No. 2

The problem

”Working in a multi-disciplinary team, I am finding myself acting as a mediator between social and natural sciences, and users and the academia”.

(Anna Krzywoszynska, Solar Energy for Future Societies)

User-driven Innovation programme in Denmark 2007-

-55 mio €, +100 projects

-Connecting the understanding of users in social sciences with technical-natural sciences

-Connecting universities with private sector and municipalities.

-My research: comparative qualitative studies of projects

No. 3

Provide vocabulary for user engagement in multidisciplinary projects

• How to find users• What to do with them• And where to go next

Purpose of this talk

No. 4

How to find the users

1. Business Anthropology – discovering unacknowledged needs

2. Lead user process – tapping into the creativity of users

3. Participatory design- Collaborating with users

No. 5

1. A similarity in methods

(observation, photo, interviews, workshops)

2. Leading to a similar excess of material…

3. Leading to at least three strikingly different ’preservation strategies’.

• Design briefs• Concepts of everyday life• Demonstrations

What to do with the users? Looking inside the projects

No. 6

User statement

Excerpt from a study

Nurse statement

Photo

Preservation strategy 1: Design briefs

No. 7

Definition

Relation to other rationalities

Examples and illustrations

EconomyTime

LogisticsHealthEthics

SocialityPleasure

Preservation strategy 2: Concepts of everyday life

No. 8

”Users”

Props

Home turf

Researchers

Video-camera

Preservation strategy 3: Demonstrations

No. 9

Design Briefs: information from and about users is presented as support for particular design ideas.

Concepts of everyday life: information from and about users is summed up in a network of concepts describing the durable structures of everyday life, which the designers of future solutions should take into account.

Demonstrations (Rehearsing the future): Practical scenario are developed in a previous workshop. The users rehearse these scenerios on location, and their enactment of how something ’might work’ is wittnessed and recorded.

Preservation stategies

No. 10

Projects as machines ?

Project synergy ?

Boundary objects (Star & Griesemer 1989)

Trading zones (Galison 1997)

Collateral benefits (Jespersen et al, forthcoming)

Where to go next ? - or what to expect

No. 11

The ebbs and flows of projects?

Complexify

Simplify

Pre Early Late Post

Project

‘preservation of users’

Defining ‘the’ technology

Technology

Users

Enga

ging

the

user

s’

No. 12

The devil is in the details: Everything in interdisciplinary projects hinges on assumptions about users and technologies, and on the arrangements and preservation styles that allow us to get these things in and out of interdisciplinary projects.

And the devil is interdisciplinary: Our world consists of wildly complex systems such as the energy system. These systems are based on contributions from a range of discilines - math, economics, physics, social science. If we want to wrestle with the problems of these ’interdisciplinary’ systems, we also have to take an interdisciplinary approach.

Conclusions: Interdisciplinarity is the problem as well as the answer