Hyysalo Sampsa

Aalto University · Department of Design

Design is increasingly used to develop public services, and considerations have arisen regarding how to gain best value from it. Design ladders and design maturity models are commonly also referenced in the public sector, but we argue that their adequate use must rest on an informed view of the diversity of design activities in public-sector organi...

Countries are moving towards renewable energy systems, which creates new requirements and pressures for the established energy policy frameworks. One emerging issue is citizen energy production in community level that has been given a central role also in recent policy reforms in the EU. However, one understudied topic is how the decision-making an...

If sustainability transitions research is to be relevant for upscaled diffusion of radical innovations and wide systemic socio-technical changes, then markets remain critical to account for. Founding frameworks in transition studies regard markets and market formation as important. Yet, the conceptualization of markets has so far not been elaborate...

Learning is commonly presented as one of the key premises of transitions governance. Empirical literature on learning in a sustainability transition context often remains on a generic level, without an in-depth analysis of what is learned and by whom. In this article, we address the study of learning in transition-related multi-party processes. We...

This chapter addresses the anticipated use and users of smart-energy technologies and the contribution of these technologies to energy sustainability. It focuses on smart grids and smart-energy meters. It examines the perceptions of European technology developers and experts on the final use and social impacts of these technologies. It further comp...

Energy transitions are in many respects past the early exploration stages and moving towards the urgently needed mass market take-up. We examine the Finnish energy transition regarding how solutions-heat-pumps, deep retrofits and new district-wide solutions-that have demonstrated economic benefits and reasonable payback times have faced slow uptake...

This article examines continuing appropriation of products and materials through the term ‘local adequacy’ and provides an alternative perspective on grassroots strategies of exercising control over technology by (re)connecting with the place of its making and using. To observe and document these strategies, we examine areas with challenging natura...

The study of how the understanding of usages and users is achieved and turned into the characteristics of products comprises ‘the sociology of user representation’ in Science and Technology Studies. Whilst the early research on the topic was foremost a critique of designers’ imposition of theirimagination and preferences on prospective users, resea...

This article examines the history of aerosledges – a Russian-invented class of over-snow motorised transport vehicles. It looks at the use of existing industrial capacities in the automotive and aviation industry to create motorised sliding vehicles to generate mobility over vast Russian snow landscapes. This resulted in a series of novel designs o...

Collaborative arrangements between users and designers today are enacted in a broadening array of circumstances. These include extended, even years-long projects within corporations, the public and third sectors, as well as open-ended, peer-to-peer open design initiatives. Building on a literature review and analysis of four concrete participatory...

Human-centered design (HCD) has developed an impressive number of methods for gaining a better understanding of the users throughout the design process. The dominant orientation in HCD research has been to develop and validate individual methods. However, there has been growing amount of criticism towards this dominant orientation, as companies and...

To date, a major portion of sustainability transition research has relied on retrospective methods to generate encompassing macro-level views of transitions. However, such methods may have considerable impacts on the insights generated in the study of intermediation, action and agency by actors on the micro-level of transitions. In this article, we...

Science and Technology Studies understandings of technological change are at odds with its own dominant research designs and methodological guidelines. A key insight from the social shaping of technology research, for instance, has been that new technologies are formed in multiple interlinked settings, by many different groups of actors over long p...

Design research is increasingly used in catalysing society-wide changes in futuring and in transition process-related deliberations. These processes underscore the role of ‘intermediate designs’ – the means, tools, and procedures that help participants to reach meaningful outcomes. Whilst intermediate designs are well recognized in collaborative de...

Energy retrofits in households are an important means of reducing energy consumption and mitigating climate change. However, energy retrofit rates have generally been lower than expected. As a key reason behind non-adoption, the complexity of energy retrofits can be challenging for adopters to handle. In this article, we study how suppliers and ret...

Comprehensive energy retrofits by households and housing companies have been recognised as important means for emission reductions. However, the diffusion of comprehensive energy retrofits has not been as fluent as expected. In this article, we study the Finnish energy retrofit market and comprehensive energy retrofit acquisition process through pa...

Vision building, pathway construction and experimentation are key processes in the management of long-term sociotechnical transitions. The need to accelerate transitions and to adapt transition management to new country contexts calls for new means to catalyse these processes. We improved the path creation toolsets and procedures of transition mana...

Research on sustainability transitions has expanded rapidly in the last ten years, diversified in terms of topics and geographical applications, and deepened with respect to theories and methods. This article provides an extensive review and an updated research agenda for the field, classified into nine main themes: understanding transitions; power...

Sustainability transitions require new policy pathways that significantly reduce the environmental impacts caused by, for example, energy production, mobility and food production. Transition management (TM) is one of the approaches aiming at the creation of new ways to govern transitions. It uses transitions arenas (TA) as a key process and platfor...

Recently, increasing attention has been paid to intermediaries, actors connecting multiple other actors, in transition processes. Research has highlighted that intermediary actors (e.g. innovation funders, energy agencies, NGOs, membership organisations, or internet discussion forums) operate in many levels to advance transitions. We argue that int...

The emergence and evolution of more sustainable technologies and related industrial fields is a core concern for sustainability transitions scholars. This interest is accentuated as it has become evident that the upscaling of transition-relevant technologies follows different pathways in varying national and geographic contexts. The usual research...

This article addresses the anticipated use and users of smart energy technologies and the contribution of these technologies to energy sustainability. It focuses on smart grids and smart energy meters. Qualitative accounts given by European technology developers and experts reveal how they understand the final use and social impacts of these techno...

Intermediary actors have been proposed as key catalysts that speed up change towards more sustainable socio-technical systems. Research on this topic has gradually gained traction since 2009, but has been complicated by the inconsistency regarding what intermediaries are in the context of such transitions and which activities they focus on, or shou...

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 addr...

and Keywords There have been many attempts to include citizens as more active players in the proliferation of renewable energy technologies. However, the roles that citizen users play in renewables proliferation are not limited to adoption, but include technological domestication, innovation, and market creation. This chapter first reviews innovati...

We address the design issue of mundane and strategic work in collaborative design. We do so through an examination of a series of participatory design activities in building a flagship library of the future. Both strategic and mundane work are found to permeate the processes, results, and further uptake of collaborative design outcomes as internal...

Citizen users play important roles in the acceleration phase of energy transitions, during which small-scale renewable energy technologies (S-RET) become taken up more widely. From users’ perspective, turning the early, and typically slow, proliferation into a more rapid and widespread diffusion requires not only the adoption of S-RET but also the...

Designers can do much for a more sustainable future. Sustainability transitions research and empirical assessment of its course in a specific context can be used to identify a relevant space-time for different design initiatives. We explore this reasoning in advancing solar photovoltaics in heritage, where a loss of aesthetic qualities and the heri...

Research on sustainable practices has attracted increasing interest as a way to understand energy demand and transitions towards sustainability. In this paper we elaborate on how practice theories can inform the discussion of experimentation. Practice theory suggests that the everyday life of people appears recalcitrant. Practices are robust, resil...

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 companie...

• Successful service design requires awareness of the various, often remarkably different, constituents of a service for different stakeholders. However, the intangible and complex nature of services adds an extra layer of trickiness to endeavors. • Giving services a material form allows for transferring knowledge amongst and between different stak...

By examining mobility in remote Arctic areas, we analyze how challenging environmental conditions – while affecting technology performance – evoke people’s creativity and efforts as technology users. Based on historical materials and ethnographic observations of user inventiveness in the transport sector in Russian North, we define and document a p...

Consumers are no longer mere adopters of small-scale renewable energy technologies (S-RETs) such as solar, pellet and heat-pump technologies. Prosumers create new technology solutions, collaborate with other consumers, and share their ideas, knowledge and inventions with peers in online communities they have formed. These activities by consumers su...

User driven innovation (UDI) is a popular term in policy and corporate circles. However, it is not clear exactly what UDI means and how such practices are used across the spectrum of companies and over the innovation life cycle. The present study compares 58 UDI showcases in Finnish companies in order to analyse the diversity of UDI practices and t...

Users invent new products and product categories, but the assumption has been that manufacturers will supplant users if their innovation is of value to many. The current paper examines Russian all terrain vehicles “karakats” to discuss a case of an era of extended user dominated technology and the related dynamics of dispersed peer-innovation. Kara...

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 naïve. Not only that, it closes important options in conducting human-centered design...

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 hi...

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...

https://issuu.com/designskolen_kolding/docs/hab_hirescmyk_singles_090315

Many argue that a decade-long crisis is crippling methods research in human-centred design (HCD). A recent paper critiques the widespread methods-as-recipe approach and suggests studying methods as part of HCD work; like in cooking, nobody cooks recipes, but they are used to bridge ingredients and meals. This paper extends that metaphor to dietary...

This article compares climate impacts of two heat-pump systems for domestic heating, that is, energy consumption for space heating of a residential building. Using a life cycle approach, the study compared the energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of direct electric heating, a conventional air-source heat pump, and a novel ground-source air...

Living laboratories are increasingly common and promising arrangements in collaborative design. Their strength lies in being real life, open ended, sustained and complex coproduction arrangements, but these characteristics also make it hard to research what difference a living lab collaboration would make – after all the project within a living lab...

The paper extends the concept of "user" to account for a new, more formalized role that some client organizations play in the diffusion of packaged enterprise systems. Package vendors are attempting to draw parts of their user base into activities related to the promotion, selling, and commodification of systems. Users, in turn, appear willing to h...

Living lab environments are often promoted as a way to engage private companies, citizens, researchers, and public organizations in mutually beneficial learning. Based on an in-depth case study of a four-year living lab collaboration in gerontechnology, we agree that successful living lab development hinges on learning between the parties, yet its...

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-man...

While climate and energy policy voice concerns about citizen's lack of improving their houses and heating systems, some citizens by far exceed the expectations. Our research on heat pumps revealed over a hundred inventions by citizen users in Finland alone, despite the technology being in many respects uninviting to modify. Users' capacity to carry...

In this article we outline a temporally extended co-design process of media technologies developed in collaboration with elderly people. In the course of doing this, we identify a set of design strategies that helped to sustain the collaboration. Based on our experiences, we recognise the need for developing design strategies for extended and evolu...

The new millennium has marked an increasing interest in citizens as energy end-users. While much hope has been placed on more active energy users, it has remained less clear what citizens can and are willing to do. We charted user inventions in heat pump and wood pellet burning systems in Finland in years 2005–2012. In total we found 192 inventions...

Housing and different buildings cause roughly one third of direct greenhouse gas emissions in Finland. The so called 20-20-20 targets set by the European Union encourage seeking efficient paths towards improved energy efficiency and thus reduced greenhouse gas emissions in all sectors. Residential building stock simulations on a national level are...

"Local climate action has recently gained attention as a complement to international and national climate policy. Within socio-technical transitions, local experiments (niches) are important initiators of change (Raven et al. 2008). Transition management views “local experiments” as central in a societal learning process for sustainability (Kemp et...

Social media changes the conditions for user participation in service development. Active user communities, fast paced iterative development, considerable development after market launch, developer access to users’ digital trails, peer production, and low cost feature distribution are well known facets that bring substantial changes. In this paper...

The design process is predominantly presented as the primordial site where creativity of highly talented people flows into material form and results in novel solutions for human concerns. Design-critical views equally place event of design on the pedestal even as they question whether designers' intuition, creativity, and aesthetic sense is enough...

This article discusses the emergence of Habbo Hotel as a large-scale virtual world and its changing versions through time. We consider how social events taking place within the hotel are conditioned by designed-in symbolic resources and how, in turn, with creative processes of symbolization, novel social objects emerge out of particular interaction...

How development and use of new technology relate? How can users contribute to innovation? The present volume is the first to study these questions by following in-detail particular technologies over several product launches. It examines the emergence of inventive ideas about future technology and uses, how these are developed into products and embe...

This paper reconceptualises the topical issue of user involvement in innovation. We argue that there is more to user involvement than the mechanistic application of methods and tools. Drawing on four case studies, we explore the range of configurations that user-inclusive innovation communities can encompass. We show that user involvement is not a...

Even when innovators know they are working with a potential breakthrough innovation, they face formidable difficulties in assessing the exact ways it will be innovative as well as deviant in regard to extant systems, business and practices. This finding emerges from our case study that spans the 40-year history of an ongoing and by now potentially...

Failure to meet the preferences and needs of users has been consistently stressed as a major cause of unsuccessful R&D for over 30 years. Yet little seems to change. An important element in this “producer–user paradox” is a lack of frameworks able to inform empirical research and the work that people do when they bridge designing, implementing, usi...

This paper focuses on an underemphasized issue in research on user innovation, namely users' adaptations and micro-innovations and their impact on industry development in user-innovation-intensive industries. It complements previous analyses of rodeo and freestyle-kayaking that explore the role of user innovators in industry development, by focusin...

Onnistunut tuotekehitys vaatii syvällistä ymmärtämystä käyttä jien toimista, tyyleistä ja haluista. Käyttäjätiedon puute on puolestaan yleisin syy tuotekehityksen epä onnis­ tu miselle. Käyttäjä tuotekehityksessä on monipuolinen pe­ rus teos siitä, miten tuotekehittäjät voivat hankkia tarvitse­ maansa tietämystä käyttäjistä ja käyttöympäristöistä....

This paper explores the role of intermediaries in the development and appropriation of new technologies. We focus on intermediaries that facilitate user innovation, and the linking of user innovation into supply side activities. We review findings on intermediaries in some of our studies and other available literature to build a framework to explor...

The importance of users for innovation has been increasingly emphasized in the literatures on design and management of technology. However, less attention has been given to how people shape technology-in-use. This paper first provides a review of literature on technology use in the social and cultural studies of technology. It then moves to examine...

User innovation school by Eric von Hippel and his numerous co investigators has done ground braking work in exploring how and why users innovate, in identifying lead-users and contributions from user innovation communities. The present paper focuses on four understudied issues in this framework that come visible when one re-examines the analysis of...

The present paper examines how representations of prospective use became designed in a novel healthcare technology for elderly people. The case lends support to studies arguing that explicit investigations provide only a part of the representations of prospective use for technology design. It draws attention to a source of representations of use th...

New technologies typically go through significant improvements during their early diffusion. Literature suggests that these modifications follow from learning-by-using. However, the micro-level processes by which learning-by-using is actually achieved remain understudied. This article examines these processes through an in-depth case study of the d...