Empowering Users through Design: Interdisciplinary Studies and Combined Approaches for Technological Products and Services [Hardcover]

At the crossroads of various disciplines, this collective work examines the possibility of a new end-user engagement in ongoing digital/technological products and services development. It provides an overview of recent research specifically focused on the users democratic participation and empowerment. It also enables readers to better identify the main opportunities of participatory design, a concept which encourages the blurring of the role between user and designer. This allows people to escape their status as end-user and to elevate themselves to the level of creator.

This book explores new avenues for rethinking the processes and practices of corporate innovation in order to cope with current socio-economic and technological changes. In so doing, it aims to help companies renew industrial models that allow them to design and produce new ranges of technological products and services by giving the user an active role in the development process, far beyond the basic role of consumer.

Intended for designers, design researchers and scientists interested in innovation and technology management, this book also provides a valuable resource for professionals involved in technology-based innovation processes.

Form Follows Practice.- Who Designs? Technological Mediation in Design Participation.- Users Continuity in Design Continuous Innovation.- Towards User Involvement in Envisioning Practices. Opening the Use of the Future.- Critical Design: a Delicate Balance between the Thrill of the Uncanny and the Interrogation of the Unknown.- Digital Objects Topologies: Transitions between Utility, Form and Intent.- Design Ethnography? Towards a Designerly Approach to Field Research.- (Mis)Behavioral Objects: Empowerment of Users vs Empowerment of Objects.- Open Sourcing Wearables: the Impact of Open Technologies and User Engagement in the Design of Body-Borne Interactive Products.- Trialogicall³U