User Centred Design and Development

These are preliminary notes. The EmergeProject will be contributing extensively to the eFramework in respect of user engagement.

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User-centred design, like many other-centred practices, traces its lineage to student-centred learning pioneered by Freire. A Freirian approach emphasises activities that are authentic to the participants’ cultural context. These other-centred practices presume to overcome the subject-object (self-other) dialogue; as Barthes might have it: I is an other. The Emerge project is part of a programme which aims to “...transform practice ... based on the needs of individual users working within institutions”; and “... to identify common requirements and processes that support education and research ... where they directly affect the quality of users’ interactions with systems.”

Central to these aims is the development of a descriptive grammar of user-centred design (users and innovation development model – UIDM link to pdf  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/capital/user_and_innovation_development_model_briefing.pdf). The project EmergeProject aimed to test the hypothesis that by using community development processes the quality of educational-technology projects might be improved. We saw the UIDM as adaptable to community development, where there was an element of purpose, practice or intention to the community. The project took a deliberately user-centred approach, modeling those experiences that project teams might have with their own developments: living the collapsing subject-object dialogue. We propose that user-centred design and development IS community development.

We hypothesised that:

  • Developing projects in a context where there is awareness of the wider activity in a field and an understanding of the alignments and gaps in that field will lead to better projects being developed.
  • By using community development processes and social networking the general quality of educational (learning) technology development projects may be improved, bringing benefits not just to the JISC but more widely to all sectoral funding agencies and stakeholders.

We saw the UIDM as being adaptable to community development, at least where there was an element of purpose, practice or intention to the community. So if you are doing user engagement for user centred design you are, to some extent doing community development. It will be beneficial to consider success conditions for community development.

We believe that community success can be facilitated by:

  • Bounded openness
  • Heterogeneous homophily
  • Mutable stability
  • Sustainable development
  • Adaptable model
  • Shared personal repertoires
  • Structured freedom
  • Multimodal identity
  • Serious fun.

This is a list of, mostly, oxymorons (communities always embody contradictions and tension) that go some way towards describing conditions for success in communities where there is shared intention, purpose or practice. This list has arisen from a number of discussions, interviews and feedback surveys conducted within a framework of appreciative inquiry in the Emerge project between April 2007 and (at this writing) March 2008. Bounded openness: we do this. We do not do that. We do not try to do everything. We have limits. You can join us doing this thing. There are boundaries. They are open. Heterogeneous homophily (thanks to Josie Fraser): homophily means liking similar people or things: shared taste; heterogeneous is mixed, various, different. It is a conundrum. We are all very different people but we share some things, not everything, in common. We are not identical. Mutable stability: changes are evolutionary and emergent; stable, like walking: we change one foot and then the other foot, move but do not fall down. Sustainable development and adaptable model are related to the previous. Like mutable stability, things are allowed to evolve, grow and change but not to consume and destroy in the process. Shared personal repertoires means to indicate that effective communities share the tricks of the trade; this relates to the second item. Structured freedom, is like mutable stability: we are free within a framework of rules (can draw for examples of the writings of activity theorists). And multimodal identity is another item like the second. Our identities have many parts (sex, career, fashion, football team, LAMP or Java...). And serious fun: of course ;-)

So, if those are *conditions* for success, how will we know if they are working? How will the success of the endeavour be determined? While success *criteria* will be multiple and contextualised, the following might be a reasonable starting point for user-centred development projects:

  • Real users (not abstractions) are involved in development teams
  • Projects have real impact in institutions
  • User interfaces are considered as important as data models, control programs and work flows
  • An ongoing, reflexively self-aware, purposeful community of collaborators makes itself visible
  • Participants share and express affectionate recollection of community activity and artefacts
  • There is wider adoption - and adaptation - of the model
  • There are positive return on investment indicators (Philips)

George Roberts

Director, Emerge Project

18 March 2008

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