ABSTRACT
Part II of this book operated on a rather detailed level of presentation to give fl esh to what kinds of fi ndings the biography of technologies and practices approach can provide. In the third part of the book, we move on to documenting other innovation processes, and, even though the fi eldwork was done with the same level of detail and quantities of data, we now present the material in a more terse manner because of limits of space. Safety-phone systems were developed in a mostly linear innovation context, dominated by the producer company. In this chapter, we proceed to examine the biography of a user-initiated innovation that soon moved into the “evolutionary co-design” innovation context. The particular project we shall focus on is called the ProWellness Diabetes Management Database (PDMS), but, as we exercise the biographies approach, this innovation process is looked at via multiple loci and several time frames of analysis. At the level of “class of technology,” Finnish diabetes databases provide over 20 years of material about the biographies of collaboration between users, user-developers, in-house coders, and outside software fi rms.
