Designing with rather than for : On the relevance, joy and importance of collaborative engaged work in the design process of a home care mobile service

• In an open innovation project called “mCity”, the aim is to verify conceptual applications for mobile services including mobile payments and transactions. On such design initiative was designated for the citizen group “seniors”, have home care taking as part of their assistance from the home care organisational system. The design initiative is called Skafferiet, a grocery-shopping application for the home care service. Based on this project, the aim in this article is to identify if and when significant design decisions were influenced by user involvement and contextual understanding detecting whether the applied design method supported the design process or if it lead to redundant activities. The applied approach was a combination of methodological strategies emphasizing co-design and engaged scholarship. The different actors involved were i) politicians, management and staff ii) caretakers iii) designers and iv) researchers. The result indicated numerous beneficial aspects with the iterative collaboration between actors. Apart from the relevance and joy of working together, it was important for the quality of the m-service, a successful implementation process and trigger for organizational improvement. The risk of rejecting one level of involvement, in favor of saving time and reduce complexity, would probably lead to a more narrow solution lacking the empowered process of involvement and engagement of all parties leading the relevance of the design process and its end-product astray.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Kommunikationssystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Communication Systems (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Engaged scholarship

reflective design

levels of user engagement

mobile services

mobile payments

home care organization

organizational development

Work-integrated learning

WIL

AIL

Work Integrated Learning

Arbetsintegrerat lärande

Informatik

Informatics

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)