ABSTRACT
Techniques for user involvement are increasingly popular in research and design, partly because they promise to enhance relevance and legitimacy, especially in relation to interactive products such as services, software and installations. This generates questions about exactly how concepts of the user feature in the processes and products of design (see also Chapter 2 by Simonsen and Hertzum). Meanwhile, the figure of the user is rarely questioned and often simply taken for granted. This chapter explores methods of representing users in three cases, from user-centred design, participatory design and participatory art. It does so in order to show how the conceptual status of the user changes when we understand design and art as ‘relational’ practices. Relational means that practices, instead of entities of their own, are distributed among many actors and many kinds of actors and these are only held together through the relational practices we investigate. While using and use obviously go on beyond the sphere of design, in this chapter we focus on the user as mobilized and understood during the design process.
