Putting the users center stage: role playing and low-fi prototyping enable end users to design mobile systems

This paper sums up lessons learned from a sequence of cooperative design workshops where end users were enabled to design mobile systems through scenario building, role playing, and low-fidelity prototyping. We present a resulting fixed workshop structure with well-chosen constraints that allows for end users to explore and design new technology and work practices. In these workshops, the systems developers get input to design from observing how users stage and act out current and future use scenarios and improvise new technology to fit their needs. A theoretical framework is presented to explain the creative processes involved and the workshop as a user-centered design method. Our findings encourage us to recommend the presented workshop structure for design projects involving mobility and computer-mediated communication, in particular project where the future use of the resulting products and services also needs to be designed.