Jacob Buur

• Managing Director at University of Southern Denmark

As collaborative business research brings together experts from academia and the business world, it is inherently cross-disciplinary. Uncovering common interests and establishing a shared language is an initial challenge. Tangible materials can have a surprising effect on collaboration as they propel the conversation from abstract arguments to conc...

In this paper, we explore a novel idea of theory instruments: tangible artifacts that encourage participatory design practitioners in the industry to reflect on interactions with technological devices in the light of a particular theory. Our Actor-Network Rings instrument is based on Actor-Network Theory, as this is one way to challenge taken-for-g...

Data visualizations and data physicalizations have become popular methods of making big data accessible to non-specialists and uncovering hidden rationales. This pictorial suggests how the acts of data drawing and data tinkering can engage young people in understanding their own data. We asked graduate design students to track their water consumpti...

While ethnographers and the data they produce already play a role in affecting industry practices, there is potential to integrate anthropological ways of seeing and knowing into a shared transdisciplinary design praxis. In a series of design research experiments, we have taken a pragmatic and playful approach to physicalizing theory. The result is...

This paper presents a design anthropological study with User Experience design departments from five large companies in Denmark, ranging from manufacturers of medical equipment through toys to control systems for industrial infrastructures We explore the challenges they face as products, services, and user research are increasingly connected. Our r...

While self-tracking data is typically captured real-time in a lived experience, the data is often stored in a manner detached from the context where it belongs. Research has shown that there is a potential to enhance people's lived experiences with data-objects (artifacts representing contextually relevant data), for individual and collective refle...

The goal of the HumanFit project is to develop an IoT Lab that supports companies in testing and developing new ideas for public health in Denmark. The IoT Lab is framed by four areas (user, organization, market, technology) and three maturity levels (low, medium, high). To determine the maturity level in each of the areas and how to move towar...

What role do people have in the Internet of Things? Compared to the impressive body of research that is currently tackling the technical issues of the Internet of Things, social aspects of agency, engagement, participation, and ethics, are receiving less attention. The goal of this 'Designing the Social Internet of Things' workshop is to contribute...

Theatre provides powerful ways to engage people in the development of visions for future interactions, yet theatre is seldom used beyond scenario acting in interaction design. In this workshop the participants are exposed to a novel understanding of theatre, called Postdramatic Theatre, which has emerged as an Avant-garde movement in theatre commun...

In recent years, the widespread use of smartphones has become the focus of a discussion on stress and distraction as a negative influence of mobile phones. We argue that this is not just rooted in the cognitive distraction from the present, but also that the style of touch user interface design, while optimized for efficient data manipulation, adds...

This paper introduces the concept of 'resourcing' to describe the fundamental activity of negotiating the use of what is available for co‐design. Even though resourcing is an ever-­‐present undertaking in all co-designing, no theoretical concept has thus far addressed the constitutive practices in collaborative design processes. We define the conce...

In this chapter, we focus on design techniques that employ a particular form of design materials, namely design cards. Design cards can support different phases of a design process, from initial ideation through ongoing concept development towards evaluation of design concepts. We present three different techniques, namely PLEX Cards, Inspiration C...

Video fieldstudies of people who could be potential users is widespread in design projects. How to analyse such video is, however, often challenging, as it is time consuming and requires a trained eye to unlock experiential knowledge in people's practices. In our work with industrialists, we have discovered that using scale-models like toy trucks h...

Design isn’t always about solving problems; it can also be used to provoke discussion around an issue of interest. In the designing environments for life workshops, we asked participants to work with materials to create ‘provotypes’ to question assumptions about people’s relation to indoor climate. Creations included a building that changed its ori...

div class="page" title="Page 1"> The value of engaging the full gamut of sensory motor skills in the design and use of smart objects and systems is recognized. Yet methods for arriving at robust and reliable outcomes for their development are not fully understood, nor are they easily reported or transferred through typical conference presentations...

With designers increasingly moving beyond button pushing and flat-screen interaction towards tangible and embodied interaction, techniques for user studies need to develop as well. While ethnographic video studies and ethnomethod-ological analyses are becoming standard in many interaction design projects, it remains a challenge to investigate in de...

Well-established companies are currently struggling to secure profits due to the pressure from new players' business models as they take advantage of communication technology and new business-model configurations. Because of this, the business model research field flourishes currently; however, the modelling approaches proposed still rely on linear...

In the quest for engaging ethnographic insight in organizations on a more fundamental level than mere ‘innovation drivers’, theatre offers ways of triggering a change in conversations through emotional engagement. This paper discusses the impact of using theatre with professional actors to convey the outcome of ethnographic ‘user studies’ to indust...

Although industry increasingly acknowledges that end user insight and participation may be a driver for innovation, we have experienced first-hand how difficult such knowledge sits with internal innovation processes, particularly in large, engineering heavy corporations. We see a loss of valuable opportunities if we do not pay attention to the orga...

We wish to alert facilitators to the merits of deploying kinetic resources within workshops. Design materials and activities involving unpredictable kinetic aspects such as balancing, bouncing, rolling and falling can lead to surprises that provoke a lively challenging of assumptions. Based on video data from many innovation workshops we show how m...

Design researchers have an important role to play when engaged with user-driven design projects in industry. Design researchers can craft ethnographic material to facilitate transfers of user-knowledge to industry, and demonstrate how this material can be used in the design of new products and services. However, ethnographic findings can reveal iss...

How to generate business is at play in most innovation projects today. Not only Internet-based businesses, but also traditional manufacturing companies with conventional product sales are currently challenged to consider alternative business models: service design, project sales, direct sales, etc. In participatory innovation the core assumption is...

Interaction design expands into new fields. Interaction design and business model innovation is a promising meeting of disciplines: Many businesses see the need to rethink their ways of doing business, and, as business models pose highly dynamic and interactive problems, interaction design has much to offer. This paper compares 'tangible business m...

The recent focus on user-driven innovation and open innovation signals a shift of concerns beyond the new product or service it self. The very model of how to make business is at play in most innovation projects today, in particular with the advent of Internet commerce. There are already examples of participatory design methods being applied to ope...

The 18th academic conference hosted by the Design Management Institute (DMI) of Boston, Mass., attracted a greater number of papers than any previous conference. The event was intended to highlight the importance of the contribution of design to organisational effectiveness and success, particularly in the ways that it can improve the new product d...

User-centred design projects that utilize ethnographic research tend to produce hours and hours of contextual video footage that seldom gets used again once the project is complete. The richness of such research video could, however, make it attractive for other project teams or researchers as source of inspiration or knowledge of a particular cont...

This paper illustrates the complexity of pointing as it is employed in a design workshop. Using the method of interaction analysis, we argue that pointing is not merely employed to index, locate, or fix reference to an object. It also constitutes a practice for reestablishing intersubjectivity and solving interactional trouble such as misunderstand...

The very model of how to make business is at play in most innovation projects today, in particular with the advent of Internet commerce. Even traditional manu-facturing companies with conventional product sales are presently challenged to consider alternative business models: Service design, project sales, direct sales etc. Public organizations are...

In this paper we describe how ongoing work with ethnographic material in a participatory innovation sets the scene for innovation to happen. We elaborate on how actionable formats of ethnographic material have been mediated to industrial partners with a stake in an innovation project. We illustrate how the stakeholders engaged in activities such as...

This paper presents a set of techniques for modelling business in rich, tangible formats. These tangible formats were developed in companies and educational settings and have proven extraordinarily successful in initiating conversations about how to innovate business in cross-disciplinary and cross-functional groups of participants. Our aim here is...

In this paper we explore the role of 'crossing intentions' among participants involved in innovation processes with users. We use improvised theatre to investigate what happens in industrial (and other) organizations that embark on participatory activities, and to explore the barriers that hinder such activities. We propose that people who meet eac...

Several case studies in literature and handbooks about participatory design (PD) suggest that the use of emerging methods to generate user information is common practice. However, these authors address practices in academia or in leading companies and not necessarily the practice of the majority of product development companies. The mentioned compa...

Ethnographic video is used extensively in some industrial corporations to document field studies and to convey an understanding of what is 'out there' to HCI designers and developers of new technologies. The basic assumption is that ethnography through questioning the prevailing conceptions of 'users' and their practices can encourage development e...

In co-design there seems to be a widespread understanding that innovation is a planned, goal-oriented activity that can be propelled forward through well-facilitated events in which company employees collaborate with external parties (users in particular) and the conversations aim at consensus about new product and service ideas. Conflict belonged...

To involve participants from the designing environments for life workshops in making sense of some of the field materials we had gathered during our project, we created ‘A-frames’ which showed images and quotes taken from the video we had recorded. This material was grouped into a number of themes aimed at bridging between the contexts that we had...

Indoor climate research usually focuses on measuring physical parameters of indoor climate, or quantifying people’s experiences through survey methods. This entails a view of people as passive recipients of indoor climate, as exemplified by the use of manikins in indoor climate chambers. We seek to confront this view with a perspective that sees pe...

This paper introduces the notion of "tangible business model sketches" -- interactive sculpture-like mechanisms -- to stimulate discussions concerning how businesses create and capture value. We outline the need for opening up discussions around innovation that these models address and their proposed utility for designers. We present three examples...

The Indoor Climate and Quality of Life Project at SPIRE (2008-2011 )was an attempt to link peoples’ perceptions and experiences of dwelling in homes, offices and kindergartens to the design of the systems and controls that regulate indoor climate environments. The project had two main objectives 1) to demonstrate how innovative indoor climate syste...

An increasing number of corporations engage with users in co-innovation of products and services. But there are a number of competing perspectives on how best to integrate these understandings into existing corporate innovation development processes. This paper maps out three of the dominant approaches, compares them in terms of goals, methods and...

Since the event of participatory design in the work democracy projects of the 1970’s and 1980’s in Scandinavia, computing technology and people’s engagement with it have undergone fundamental changes. Although participatory design continues to be a precondition for designing computing that aligns with human practices, the motivations to engage in p...

In this paper we discuss the potential for Participatory Design (PD) to make a fundamental contribution to the business-oriented field of user-driven innovation, taking note of where we find PD can best benefit from interaction with this other field. We examine some of the challenges that must be addressed if PD is to contribute to innovation proce...

In this paper, we present our experience in sharing ethnographic material with engineers that have a very different perception of technology and the role of its users. Rather than convey findings' in a rational argument, we have experimented with formats where the role of the ethnography is to provoke engineers to reframe their perception of new de...

A growing uneasiness among users with the experience of current product user interfaces mounts pressure on interaction designers to innovate user interface conventions. In previous research we have shown that a study of the history of product interaction triggers a broader discussion of interaction qualities among designers in a team, and that the...

In this paper, we present a project in which we explored interactional possibilities for designing a tangible configuration interface as an alternative to conventional input devices in the field of industrial refrigeration maintenance. Based on ethnographic field studies and design workshops, we built three prototypes of configuration interfaces. E...

Digital video for user-centred co-design is an emerging field of design, gaining increasing interest in both industry and academia. It merges the traditions of design ethnography, participatory design, interaction analysis, scenario-based design, and usability studies into an integrated approach, which values the designer's capacity to study and ch...

Our current understanding of human interaction with hybrid or augmented environments is very limited. Here we focus on 'tangible interaction', denoting systems that rely on embodied interaction, tangible manipulation, physical representation of data, and embeddedness in real space. This synthesis of prior 'tangible' definitions enables us to addres...

The aim of this paper is firstly to characterize the richness of human actions, based on observations of skilled practice in industrial environments, as opposed to actions in office contexts. Secondly, it is to introduce techniques that may help designers explore and support the richness of human actions in the design of future tangible user interf...

Design education is diversifying as it responds both to the needs of industry, and to the long-standing demands for design (as a discipline) to take its place as a legitimate academic field in its own right. In this paper we describe an attempt to integrate design research into a studio-based design education by giving students the opportunity to a...

This panel will discuss how academia can contribute to industry practice and how industry practitioners can contribute to academia. We will focus in particular on how theories and practices are formed and shaped in different settings. We will discuss when academic theories and practices help industry, when and why they are discarded, and how they a...

In our research on tangible user interaction we focus on the design of products that are dedicated to a particular user, task and context. In doing so, we are interested in strengthening the actions side of tangible interaction. Currently, the actions required by electronic products are limited to pushing, sliding and rotating. Yet humans are capab...

The authors present a design case in which field design sessions are introduced to bridge the designers' imagination and the users' knowledge of the use context. This approach entailed immersing design teams in the environment of the product-to-be during the conceptual design phase. With a background in the Scandinavian tradition of participatory o...

There is an increasing recognition in the society that interdisciplinary challenges must be part of new educational practices. In this paper, we describe the key curriculum activities at the University of Southern Denmark that combine mathematical modelling, software engineering, and user-centred design courses. These three disciplines represent a...

In architecture and industrial design, the concept of style plays a major role in education as a way of establishing an understanding of visual design expression. In this article we claim that interaction design can benefit greatly from an understanding of the concept of style. It can provide designers with strong visions and a sense of direction i...

This paper develops a design case format capable of engaging design practitioners and design students in reflective dialog about their user centred design practice. The core idea is to present project team experience as an open resource for reflection and learning. By exploring short snippets of video that document design team activities, designers...

This research explores gestures used in the context of activities in the workplace and in everyday life in order to understand requirements and devise concepts for the design of gestural information appliances. A collaborative method of video interaction analysis devised to suit design explorations, the Video Card Game, was used to capture and anal...

This paper documents the design process for an augmented children's play environment centred on that most ubiquitous and simple of objects, the cardboard box. The purpose of the exercise is to show how computer technology can be used in innovative ways ...

The "design collaboratorium" is a new usability practice that has been developed in an action re-search project between three industrial usability labs and a university. The design collaboratorium has been developed as a reaction to the failing capabilities of classical usability methods to cope with ubiquitous technologies. It has borrowed element...

In recent years, the context in which designers work has undergone significant change. Designers have brought video, transcript and other studies of users and use contexts into design studios, have brought users into the design studio, have turned users into pseudo-designers and have moved the act of designing from the studio to the field of use, t...

In 1945 Vannevar Bushs As We May Think envisioned a future of networked media that would create new relationships among people, their ideas and their activities. In the ensuing years much of our world has been shaped by this vision. This talk will cover ...

This paper presents an exploratory process in which three industrial usability groups, in cooperation with HCI researchers, worked to reframe their own work practice. The usability groups moved beyond a classical usability setting towards a new way of working which we have coined the Design Collaboratorium. This design collaboratorium is a design a...

In architecture and industrial design, the concept of style plays a major role in education as a way of explaining the historical inheritance and comparing alternative design expressions.In this article we claim that interaction design can benefit greatly from an understanding of the concept of style. It can provide designers with strong visions an...

In User Centred Design, the integration of knowledge of users work practice, preferences etc. into the design process is crucial to success. For this reason, video recording has become a widespread tool for documenting user activities observed in field studies, usability tests and user workshops. To make sense of video recordings - though a rewardi...

In this paper, we discuss how the use of video in e.g. ethnographically inspired fieldwork can gain from looking at video as a design material rather than as 'hard data'. The participatory nature of the video media is emphasised, and co-authoring is suggested to be potentially fruitful when design teams work with video. The paper introduces four ca...

User-Centred Design in industry is moving towards a common understanding that involving users in design orientated collaboration is much more beneficial than classical usability testing, (Madsen and Borgholm, 1999). The collaborative workshop formats developed in university settings in particular in Scandinavia, (e.g., Greenbaum and Kyng, 1991), 10...

The article focuses on usability testing that has now become a well-known method in product development for examining new products before they are put in hands of users. In practice, usability testing is often seen as a way to obtain objective data on the use of products for Research & Development (R&D) departments. Due to this conception of object...

Innovation in design is becoming increasingly important as businesses see the limits of cost reduction strategies for improving productivity, profit, and growth.To create innovation in design we will show that designing in skilled practice has an inner logic: a structure that allows it to be understood as a kind of reasoning, a form of inquiry, but...

It is widely recognized that the increasingly dynamic and competitive business environment requires the exploration and integration of specialized knowledge from different domains in order to create innovative and competitive artefacts and reduce design and development costs. This paper presents the ‘Design Explorer’ research project whose goal is...

This chapter identifies characteristics that differentiate solid user interface (SUI) from graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and highlights the different methods for analysis, design, and testing that SUIs require. As touch-screen technology develops, and GUI design aims for increased realism in portraying three-dimensional objects on two-dimensiona...

Solid user interfaces are the key to many of the electronic products which people use in their everyday personal and working lives: domestic and consumer equipment, telephones, ticket machines, measuring and metering devices and so on. Despite their prevalence they have received relatively little research attention compared to the graphical user in...

Mechatronics may be regarded simply as a product technology which integrates mechanics with electronics and informatics, but in fact mechatronics has a very wide impact on industrial product development and company organization. The author points out relations between the characteristics of mechatronics technology and the strategy patterns followed...

Because of the language barrier, progress in design methodology research and application in Japan is seldom reported in Europe. The purpose of this paper is to review the present situation of design research, education and the application of methods in Japan. Machine design research in Japan is dominated by CAD systems development and the industria...

The development of mechatronic products needs special design strategies to cope with fast-moving markets and it needs a development department geared for the interdisciplinary task of combining mechanics with electronics and software. Japanese mechatronic companies have understood this well, and this paper attempts to describe some of the working p...

Design models are important tools in mechatronics design. Based on well-known types of design models, like flow chart, design sketch, function model and prototype, this article describes important terms associated with modelling and proposes a model morphology as a convenient system for categorizing. In the early phases of product development, mode...

INTRODUCTION In this article we propose design games as a way of building design competence for design students as well as for practitioners. We report on four experiments in which game playing, game creation and game reflection has revealed a potential in developing design competence. We show how the use of games can contribute to talking about co...

In the field of Human Computer Interaction, some studies have looked at aspects and theories in cultural studies in order to evaluate methods and design approach of computer system development. Cross-cultural studies, in particular, have been used to compare the use of methods and design results across culture (1,2). However, these studies are stru...

Documentary video is regularly used to support user research in user-centred design, and many researchers are familiar with this medium. There is strong research evidence that video can contribute substantially to human-computer interaction and interaction design. But the question what role the video camera actually plays in studying people and est...