Pelle Ehn

Malmö University | mah · School of Arts and Communication (K3)

Pelle Ehn is Professor Emeritus at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University. He has been involved in collaborative and participatory design for more than four decades. For the last 15 years his research has been focused on design and digital media. He is co-author of Design Things (MIT Press, 2011) and co-editor of Making Futures: M...

For more than four decades, participatory design has provided exemplars and concepts for understanding the democratic potential of design participation. Despite important impacts on design methodology, participatory design has, however, been stuck in a marginal position as it has wrestled with what has been performed and accomplished in participato...

This prologue is carried by a Design Mailboat. It was originally destined for the opening of the 2012 Design and Displacement conference (organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science and the European Association for Studies of Science and Technology) in Copenhagen, where the exchange was performed. Here the Design Mailboat has been redire...

The workshop will examine issues around emerging participation in (re-)designing technological and/or societal infrastructures. Contributions should provide cases and/or methodological reflections on connecting ongoing social or professional practices involving infrastructure usages with emerging and/or collaborative processes of changing/improving...

We may all agree on the importance of end users, as in end user programming, human centred design or user driven innovation. But are there theoretical limits with political implications to this anthropocentric understanding of our engagement with users, technology and the artifacts we call computers? Has the end user been patronised by contemporary...

Participatory design (PD) has become increasingly engaged in public spheres and everyday life and is no longer solely concerned with the workplace. This is not only a shift from work-oriented productive activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements, but also a new milieu for production and ‘innovation’. What ‘democratic innovation’ entails is o...

In this paper we reflect upon design at a conceptual level, discussing how creativity can be coupled with participation and experience, dialoguing with philosophers and social theorists, and looking for the experiential grounds of our understanding of the very nature of design. Three words: 'drawing', 'thing' and 'together', are at the center of ou...

Participatory design has become increasingly engaged in public spheres and everyday life and is no longer solely concerned with the workplace. This is not only a shift from work oriented productive activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements, but also a new milieu for production and innovation and entails a reorientation from "democracy at wo...

Social life is communication. To live in a society means sharing things. And this we do not through, but in, communication. That is how things become common, and hence how communities are formed.

This paper discusses the design of things. This is done in an attempt to conceptually explore some of the political and practical challenges to participatory design today. Which things, and which participants? The perspective is strategic and conceptual. Two approaches are in focus, participatory design (designing for use before use) and meta-desig...

We started the work reported on here with the ambition to create inspirational learning environments for design and architecture students in the spirit of Weiser’s vision of taking the computer “out of the box” and making computational resources augment a design studio environment ubiquitously. Computing environments are becoming populated by a ric...

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...

studios. A newly established research studio is concerned with the design of technology-augmented creative environments.

In this short paper we present the conceptual framework underlying research projects in a newly established research studio concerned with the design of technology-augmented creative environments. The studio investigates design-oriented collaborative environments for inspirational learning with demands on discovery and creative spaces. This is inte...

'What is needed in design and use of the most post-modern media and technologies - the information and communication technology - is not a modernism caught in a solidified objectivity in the design of modern objects in steel, glass and concrete, but a comprehensive sensuality in the design of meaningful interactive and virtual stories and environme...

Professionals in workplace innovation operate in practice as collective designers and political entrepreneurs as well as applied scientists. They apply and adapt human factors and organizational knowledge and techniques to enable projects to succeed in complex, culturally diverse, and politically charged change processes. This creates a major chall...

Computer support for design as cooperative work is the subject of our discussion in the context of our research program on Computer Support in Cooperative Design and Communication. We outline our theoretical perspective on design as cooperative work, and we exemplify our approach with reflections from a project on computer support for envisionment...

In the history of modern society several grand projects have been launched in an attempt to unite the two sides of the Enlightenment project: the hard (technology and natural sciences) with the soft (values, democracy, art and ethics). One remarkable such project was the Bauhaus. It was a great modern success story, but also a failure. Today, in th...

The lack of usability of software and poor design of programs is the secret shame of the industry." This statement opens a "design manifesto" from a top manager in the US IT industry arguing that systems developers and programmers often lack "the design viewpoint" and need a supplementary design competence similar to that of architects and industri...

This paper is concerned with ‘design-by-playing’. As the model case we will refer to a game played at Konsumentverket, the Swedish national board for consumer policies, in 1988. The main reason to construct such an organizational design game was the shortcomings encountered in earlier uses of traditional description methods in processes of particip...

This is a paper about activities such as information system development and software engineering. The specific aspects of these activities that are being investigated are the academic organization for these studies, and the doctrines that are being taught at departments of computer science, information science, informatics, etc. The paper begins wi...

This thesis is an inquiry into the human activity of designing computer artifacts that are useful to people in their daily activity at work. The emphasis is on opportunities and constraints for industrial democracy and quality of work. First, the philosophical foundation of design of computer artifacts is con­ sidered. The need for a more fundament...

This paper deals with computers and cooperative work. Focus in not on applications for cooperative work, but on the cooperative process of designing such and other computer applications. Focus is on the role of skill and participation in design as a creative and communicative process. The paper suggests a need to go beyond the Cartesian philosophic...

Computer support for design as cooperative work is the subject of our discussion in the context of our research program on Computer Support in Cooperative Design and Communication. We outline our theoretical perspective on design as cooperative work, and we exemplify our approach with reflections from a project on computer support for envisionment...

An abstract is not available.

In this paper, we describe the influence of physical proximity on the development of collaborative relationships between scientific researchers and on the execution of their work. Our evidence is drawn from our own studies of scientific collaborators, ...

The paper reflects our design experiences from two research projects in very different application domains; newspaper pre-press production and small and medium scale carpentry shop production. In the UTOPIA project tools for skill enhancement were tried out in the high tech area of powerful graphic workstations for full page make-up and picture pro...

p>This paper presents a conceptual framework, useful when designing computer support for skilled workers. We call this framework a tool perspective . It has emerged as a result of a growing dissatisfaction with the systems perspective , which tends to give an outwardly understanding, making men, machines and materials look alike and reducing work t...

The objective of the DEMOS project (Democratic Planning and Control in Working Life) is the development of knowledge about planning, control and computer use. It is based upon the interests of workers and their trade unions and consists of two parts. The first is the study and analysis of corporate planning, control and computer use in cooperation...

This paper presentsthe resultsof empiricalstudy of mental representations of the fieldof IICI,obtainedby statistical analysis. Eight 1101experts participating in the study were asked to classifythe papers presentedat the EWHCI'92 Conference. The resultsshow satisfactory agreement between the experts' classifications,as well as high interpretability...

This assemblage is based on the talk I gave at the EASST010 conference in Trento, Italy, September 03, 2010. It is composed of several kinds of materials. The ground structure is formed by the slides I showed at that occasion. These slides are commented in three different ways. Firstly by excerpts from the talk, secondly by comments added now when...

Participatory design has always been about alternative futures: in the practice of (often marginalized) groups in society it has, through design practice, tried to support democratic changes. This started as actions research oriented collaboration with local trade unions at the workplace challenging the use of technology and the management prerogat...

Beginning in 1976, the DEMOS Project worked together with trade union organizations for three years at four different work locales. This co-operative effort concerned the unions' possibilities to influence the planning and use of new technology at the local level in the company. The study also sought to examine the obstacles and limits confronting...

UTOPIA is the name of a Nordic research project. It is in the Scandinavian languages the acronym for Training, Technology And Product from the Perspective of Skills and Democracy at Work (Utbildning, Teknik Och Produkt I Arbetskvalitetsperspektiv. ) The aim is to develop trade union oriented alternatives for computerbased text- and image processing...