Making sense of methods and approaches to user involvement

Abstract

There has been a dramatic growth in the ways of involving users in various product, service, space, and systems development activities. Various categorizations, listings, and mappings have been proposed for making sense of this user-involvement landscape. The present paper introduces the main types of currently available clarificatory mappings used in design for, with, and by users, as well as the shortcomings associated with them. It then proceeds to elaborate how such mappings could be better organized in the future, stressing the importance of distinguishing between techniques, methods, methodologies, and approaches. While sensible mappings are difficult if not impossible to ever achieve regarding techniques and methods, wider approaches in how designer–user relations are organized in time and space do appear to be amenable to differentiation. We elaborate a typology of nine approach-level user-involvement configurations based on resemblance relations, and how these in turn help make sense of wider research areas.