User-oriented Product Design

This programme focuses on some of the less obvious, but more difficult issues: How do you organise user-oriented activities so they get traction in the organisation? How do you balance the many views on what to do and why that opens up when you engage a wide array of stakeholders in an innovation project? To many this is scary, because activities are less easy to control in a traditional sense.

From user studies to innovation
User-oriented design starts with an understanding of users and context. The programme presents a set of ethnographic techniques for studying what people do and appreciate. Core in the education is then the shift from analytic findings to creative design material that enables you to engage with the project team or larger circles of stakeholders in making sense and moving towards design and innovation. The goal of the programme is that you learn to work professionally with user research and user involvement in an organisational context.

Action research
In a field in rapid development, and with technology in constant flux, methods aren’t stable. Designers need to constantly reconsider their work practices and invent new techniques. In this programme, methods research in the actual work setting is integrated as a natural way of learning and developing design methods.

Organisers
The programme is organised by the strategic research centre SPIRE in collaboration with Dacapo, an interactive theatre company specialising in organisational innovation. The programme runs under the part-time Master of IT programme of IT-Vest and may count as part (15 ECTS) of a full Master of IT education.

What do you get?: This programme develops competence in completing user research in a way that it gains influence both within an industrial organisation and in broader circles of external stakeholders.

Seminar 1 (01.-02.05.2012): User Research on Your Video Mobile (2 days).
Builds competence in how to study people and practices with simple but efficient techniques for studying use and engaging colleagues in the organisation:

• Video research as a method
• Video ethnography
• Video specs
• Video wall
• Video card game etc.

Follows a new handbook 'Video Hopscotch'.

Seminar 2 (15.-16.05.2012): Uptake of User Knowledge in the Industrial Organization (2 days)
Builds understanding of design negotiation processes and competence in gaining traction for user viewpoints in an organization:

• Ethnographic provocation.
• Social Shaping of Innovation.
• Theatre activities train user involvement and organisation hand-overs.

Seminar 3 (12.-13.06.2012): Open Innovation in Multi Stakeholder Workshops (2 days)
Builds competence in how to facilitate complex stakeholder workshops with many interests (both external, e.g. users, and internal. e.g. marketing, sales, quality etc.) and open agendas.

Workshop basics:

• Focus group interview
• Future workshops
• World cafe
• Open space
• Theater activities stimulate exercise and discussion
• Complex responsive processes
• Quality of conversation
• Practical exercises in design negotiation
• Business model innovation etc.

Applicants must have a Bachelor in Computer Science, Information (and Computing) Technology, Multimedia, or similar.

Based on an individual assessment, the programme may accept applicants without a formal Bachelor’s degree, if they have equivalent academic qualifications.