| 1. |
- Berlin, Cecilia, 1981, et al.
(författare)
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Development of a stakeholder identification and analysis method for human factors integration in work system design interventions – Change Agent Infrastructure
- 2022
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Ingår i: Human Factors and Ergonomics In Manufacturing. - : Wiley. - 1520-6564 .- 1090-8471. ; 32:1, s. 151-170
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In any work system design intervention—for example, a physical workplace redesign, a work process change, or an equipment upgrade—it is often emphasized how important it is to involve stakeholders in the process of analysis and design, to gain their perspectives as input to the development, and ensure their future acceptance of the solution. While the users of an artifact or workplace are most often regarded as being the most important stakeholders in a design intervention, in a work‐system context there may be additional influential stakeholders who influence and negotiate the design intervention's outcomes, resource allocation, requirements, and implementation. Literature shows that it is uncommon for empirical ergonomics and human factors (EHF) research to apply and report the use of any structured stakeholder identification method at all, leading to ad‐hoc selections of whom to consider important. Conversely, other research fields offer a plethora of stakeholder identification and analysis methods, few of which seem to have been adopted in the EHF context. This article presents the development of a structured method for identification, classification, and qualitative analysis of stakeholders in EHF‐related work system design intervention. It describes the method's EHF-related theoretical underpinnings, lessons learned from four use cases, and the incremental development of the method that has resulted in the current method procedure and visualization aids. The method, called Change Agent Infrastructure (abbreviated CHAI), has a mainly macroergonomic purpose, set on increasing the understanding of sociotechnical interactions that create the conditions for work system design intervention, and facilitating participative efforts.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Eriksson, Siw, 1962, et al.
(författare)
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‘Co-Creation’ is On Everyone’s Lips – Designers’ Perception of Opportunities For and Barriers To Co-Creation in Product Development Organizations
- 2022
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Co-creation, aimed at encouraging users to become active partners throughout the development process, has been widely discussed in academia for the last 10-15 years as a strategy for sustainable design of products that fulfil users’ needs and enhance users’ experience of future products. However, despite the fact that universities have undertaken to educate future designers on methods and tools for co-creation with users, we emphasize that there is still a noticeable gap between theory and practice, as designers’ opportunities for incorporating co-creation activities in product development organizations remain limited. The aim of this study, consisting of twelve semi-structured, in-depth interviews with design practitioners from Swedish industry, was to create a deeper understanding of the extent to which designers can and do actively involve users in the design process in industrial organizations. While we found that designers were interested and willing to work in a more user-centered way, there was no evidence of co-creation with users. The companies’ marketing departments were mainly responsible for customer/user contact, identifying and communicating user/customer requirements by means of traditional marketing methods. Hence direct communication between designers and users was rarely supported. Moreover, the informants often experienced a strong reluctance from the marketing department to provide them with necessary contacts, as this might interfere with their relationship with the customer. The barriers to accessing users were even more pronounced for designers in consultancy firms, where the customer functioned as the link to the market and frequently declined to allocate resources to user studies, arguing that they already possessed the necessary knowledge or that such studies were too costly. Consequently, irrespective of intra- or inter-organizational settings, designers’ ability to access users often depended on individual motivation and initiatives rather than organizational factors.
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| 4. |
- Eriksson, Siw, 1962, et al.
(författare)
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Facilitating Users and Designers Towards a Shift of Perspective for True Participation in Co-creation in Health Care: A Holistic Activity Theoretical Approach
- 2020
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Design4Health, Amsterdam, 2020. - 9781838111700 ; 1, s. 177-184
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Modern healthcare is a complicated sociotechnical system where medical technology is a prerequisite for quality as well as cost-effectiveness. New and complex technologies for diagnosis and treatment are progressively developed to meet the challenge of future health care. However, this requires increasingly close cooperation by heterogeneous stakeholders with various views that must be heard and negotiated. Traditional participatory design approaches may not suffice to establish the needed close cooperation. This paper builds on the authors’ research over the last decades on eliciting stakeholders needs and requirements in the development of medical products by means of participatory design processes, analysed by Activity Theory (AT). By facilitating stakeholders’ interactions with mediating tools, the rules and relationships that shape behaviours and outcomes to become visible. AT reveals and supports our understanding from a holistic perspective of the need for a shift of perspectives to form a new and shared activity system in a collaborative space that bridges the gaps between participants and thus holistically allows individuals to bring their respective knowledge, experiences, and motivations into co- creation processes. This requires a meta-shift of perspective that needs to be facilitated in the co-creation process and can only occur if and when participants are enabled to understand the process and the role(s) they have.
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| 5. |
- Eriksson, Siw, 1962, et al.
(författare)
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Genuine co-design : an activity theory analysis involving emergency nurses in an interdisciplinary new product development project of a novel medical device
- 2021
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Ingår i: International Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomics. - 2045-7804 .- 2045-7812. ; 8:4, s. 331-369
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study analysed a series of workshops and explored prerequisites for interdisciplinary co-design among industrial designers, design engineers and users in the development of a novel medical device. Presented as a case study, this paper focus on what affects participants’ transformative processes towards genuine participation in co-design processes. Based on activity theory, we suggest that co-design activities have to support not only users, but all participants, shifting their perspectives beyond their own domain’s rules, motives, objects and division of labour, i.e., beyond their own activity system, to support users’ participation as equal members in design teams. We propose that genuine co-design requires a holistic approach where a neutral arena, an impartial facilitator, clear rules of play, along with representational artefacts as mediating tools in the formation of a new collective activity system to foster equality, mutual value and long-term knowledge generation. Such approach requires a process over time.
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| 6. |
- Eriksson, Siw, 1962, et al.
(författare)
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RE-THINKING DESIGN REPRESENTATIONS IN DESIGN EDUCATION: AN INTERVIEW STUDY WITH PROFESSIONAL DESIGNERS
- 2023
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the Design Society. - 2732-527X. ; 3, s. 3095-3104
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Design representations are important tools for designers in the design process. To help designers choose the appropriate representation, taxonomies have been proposed based on type, degree of fidelity, and when to use them. However, Design representations may also play an important role in designers' communication with users and enabling users as co-designers. Therefore, new taxonomies, focusing on design representations' potential mediating roles in collaborative design processes with users, have been developed. The purpose of this interview study, with twelve designers within Swedish industry, was thus to investigate how designers use design representations in communication with users in the design process. The study indicates that the designers mainly interacted with users in order for them to answer specific design questions or to evaluate design solutions. If design representations' value for facilitating communication and collaboration with users should be emphasized, we need to shift from teaching mainly taxonomies related to fidelity levels or when to use them in the design process, and rather educate future designers about design representations inherent potential to mediate and enhance the dialogue with users.
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| 7. |
- Eriksson, Siw, 1962
(författare)
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The mediating role of product representations. A study with three dimensional textiles in early phases of innovation
- 2014
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Smart textiles are understood as textiles, where new functions are integrated to form a textile system that can react and interact with the environment. These new textile systems place completely new demands on the actors in the development process. With smart textiles at hand, the textile sector is almost facing a paradigm shift, which requires new manufacturing techniques; new ways of working and new roles need to be developed. New collaborations across disciplinary boundaries need to be created in order to generate new innovative products. Research state that it is of paramount importance that users are involved as early as possible in the development process of innovative products, the argument being that they possess knowledge regarding the product and its everyday use, which is lacking among designers. However, such user involvement may be limited to users acting as informants or as evaluators, but the involvement can also develop into the user becoming a member of the multidisciplinary team, a co-designer representing his/her own discipline. This is argued to facilitate the recognition of user needs and taking of them into consideration in the development process. However, such teams also face a number of challenges. One of the challenges is that the team members often lack a common language and use of terms, as they need to establish cross disciplinary communication in order to successfully specify a common goal. Furthermore, it is necessary to convert knowledge from one area of expertise into information, which is comprehensible to someone with other experiences and skills, as this makes the knowledge valuable to a individual, who has a different background or views the problem from a different perspective. The case presented in this study concerns a project where a multidisciplinary team was gathered to explore the possibility of using three-dimensional weaving techniques combined with smart textile technology to solve a clinical problem in long-term monitoring of brain activity (EEG). In the project, textile product representations were developed iteratively in collaboration with the user of the future product.The case studied aimed to understand how product representations can facilitate the dialogue in multidisciplinary teams in order to bridge the gap between users and designer. The analysis of the data reveals the importance of the product representations mediating the discussions and the sharing of knowledge but also that the product representations played different roles in the process. Five different roles were identified, the roles have further been categorized into two main groups: explanatory and concrete roles and more proactive roles.The explanatory roles are defiend such as;-’verbaliser' serving as a facilitator to fill in where words as missing or terms are not understood,- ’demonstrator’ helping to concretize questions and answers between the user and the designer.The more proactive roles were defined as;- ‘visualisers’, which denotes situations when representations support individuals to recall or evoke mental images,- ’stimulators’ that support the generation of new ideas or design solutions and the progressionof new ideas and new shared knowledge in the project, and- ‘integrators’ that support the integration of perspectives between different disciplines and unites different perspectives in the team.The conclusion of this study is that the representation supports and facilitates the collaboration and communication across disciplines, bridging gaps and generating new shared knowledge.
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| 8. |
- Wallgren, Pontus, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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How to make advanced online user studies meaningful
- 2021
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the Design Society. - : Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 2732-527X. ; 1, s. 1787-1796
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- It is of vital importance to explore and understand future users' needs and requirements in the early phases of the product development process. However, in times of social distancing meeting users might not be possible. The project reported on in this paper has investigated the possibilities of conducting advanced user studies online. In total 30 small experimental studies have been conducted. Common digital tools that were used were e.g. Zoom, Teams, Mural, Miro, Snapchat, and Instagram. The data was analyzed in a thematic content analysis by the authors on Mural. Identified challenges were excluding not tech-savvy user groups, missing out on interpersonal interaction and observations, as well as difficulties creating participant commitment and trust. On the positive side were perceived efficiency, a more levelled power distribution between participants, and ease of engagement and data retrieval for tech-savvy users. Identified best practices included lowering social barriers through warm up activities and techniques to support open discussion during workshops. Furthermore, engagement could be supported through private social media groups, regular reminders, as well as clear communication of purpose and goal of the activities.
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