ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to discuss the fact that workers finish the design. It presents a case to illustrate the approach: designing an alarm system to guard against chemical runaways in chemical plants. In risky work, designers' anticipations consist in 'specifying boundaries on action', and allowing workers to finish the design in a 'space of functional action possibilities'. The approach taken within instrument-mediated activity tries to grasp the inventiveness as it is manifested in the activity of workers confronted with a technique. Mutual learning between users and designers is important in participatory design, but many researchers argue that achieving mutual learning between users and designers is a difficult task. In a mutual learning process, design is more of a cyclical process, where the result of one person's activity constitutes a source for the activity of another. The 'cooperative design' approach aims to establish a design process wherein both users and designers are participating actively and creatively, based on their differing qualifications.
