Designing for other people’s strengths and motivations: Three cases using context, visions, and experiential prototypes

The front end of product development has seen a rapid growth in attention for the end-users. For radical innovation, as well as for redesign and optimization, design teams are looking to incorporate the experiential knowledge of users into the design solutions. By means of three cases, we describe participatory techniques in the early phases of design, and how they impact both the content and the methods of designing. Key elements in this are found in the establishing of needs, requirements, design visions, and early experience prototyping. But these different steps are no longer clearly separated, as iterative prototyping with user participation throughout the design process is becoming a more regular approach to designing.