What Can Design Laboratories Do?
Résumé
The distinction between design and use is getting blurred in several
ways as products and services increasingly are co-created in use, and use and
users proliferate and diversify. This has led to a growing interest in staging
what we here will call design laboratories that both involve future users in
codesign and incubate emergent everyday practices of design in use. Very little
can be said about novel designs or technologies before it is seen what the users
make of it. This is particularly the case when considering mobile technologies
and social media where products seem to act more as an infrastructure for
design in use than as a provision of well defined services. At the same time
envisioning such new designs without being in close dialogue with the people
who are to appropriate them in new everyday practices may easily lead to
disappointing results. This has led to a renewed interest in codesign and user
involvement in such formats as living labs and codesign workshops. This panel
brings together researchers from some of the environments that most vigorously
has pursued this line of inquiry. Some of the panelists have suggested the
concept of design laboratories as a platform for open-ended explorations of the
co-evolution of artifacts and practice. They see the design laboratory as a
confined space of controlled experimentation with what can be collaboratively
imagined, scalable through its rehearsals of experimental practices. With this
definition of these new collaborative formats the panel asks what it is that
constitutes a successful design laboratory and what we can expect design
laboratories to accomplish in a world of diversity.