Ecologies of user knowledge: linking user insight in organisations to specific projects

ABSTRACT

Failure to meet user preferences continues to prevail as a major reason for innovation project failure despite wide arrays of methods and methodologies available for addressing it. The user research and user insight availability problem appears to have become replaced by a method and insight adequacy problem. This calls for the means to better address how organisations and project teams know their users, and how this knowing is intertwined in other organisational processes. A research challenge lies in developing representational templates that are both specific enough for addressing explicit and implicit user insight and encompassing enough for linking these to the relevant project and organisational issues. We develop such a representational template based on ecologies of knowledge mapping and discuss its potential through applying it to a comparative study on two social media web service projects of the Finnish National Broadcasting Company.

KEYWORDS:

• User involvement
• ecology of knowledge
• technology and innovation studies
• socio-technical

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the following sources: Academy of Finland project no 13289520 Getting Collaborative Design Done, Finnish Foundation for Technology Promotion, and Finnish Foundation for Economic Education. We are also grateful for the help from Dr. Pia Hannukainen in data gathering and early analysis of FNBC materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Samuli Mäkinen is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Aalto University, where he has been working on strategic user involvement. He has over 15 publications on the topic, backed up by extensive user involvement experience from various design contexts, while also lecturing both in industry and academia.

Sampsa Hyysalo works as professor of CoDesign in Department of Design, Aalto University. His research interest is in the roles that users play in design and sociotechnical change more broadly. His research orientation is multidisciplinary: collaborative design, science & technology studies, and innovation studies being his main fields of reference. Sampsa has published about 50 full length peer review articles and book chapters. He has authored several books, the latest being ‘The new production of users: Changing innovation communities and involvement strategies’ (with Elgaard Jensen and Oudshoorn, Routledge, 2016). He was the chief editor of Science & Technology Studies journal 2007-2016 and has been awarded the Academy of Finland price for social impact of research in 2010 and EASST Freeman Price 2016.

Mikael Johnson is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Design, Aalto University. Mikael has worked as an interaction designer and as a software engineer in a range of projects. His research focuses on user-centered design, strategic user involvement, social media and energy use. His doctoral thesis at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Aalto University, focused on how social media changes user-centered design.

Notes

1. The relative underdevelopment of user knowledge in innovation and knowledge management may be due to the issues of users becoming crowded out by research on innovation by users and more radical questions about where, when, what and how much users, rather than manufacturers, innovate (e.g. von Hippel 2005, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Academy of Finland: [grant number 13289520 Getting Collaborative Design Done]; Finnish Foundation for Economic Education; Finnish Foundation for Technology Promotion.