Investigating our future: how designers can get us all thinking

This paper, and the presentation it represents, discusses the importance of bringing users into the design process and some of the techniques that can be employed to achieve that. Designing for older people is particularly challenging because most designers do not have direct experience of the ways that people’s lives and expectations change as they become older so it is even more important than usual to give the user a direct voice in the designing. However this is not straightforward. Most people find it difficult to visualise products and environments that do not exist at the moment so we need to help them imagine possibilities and express their needs and desires. Sheffield Hallam University has pioneered methods for using the designer’s creative talents to create situations that allow people to act out new situations and engage with the creative opportunities that they present. These methods are particularly important in the contemporary world where products are connected by complex information systems so we must attend to how people engage with both the physical aspects of a product or environment and the systems that underlie them