Blue-sky and down-to-earth: how analogous practices can support the user-centred design process

We discuss how traditional methods for understanding design requirements are leveraged to produce innovative and fundamentally new perspectives when using analogy. We call these analogous practice approaches, and illustrate two cases that both use analogy to achieve exploratory design with ethnography, by gathering data from a different setting than we intend to design for. We discuss how the use of analogy is different in the cases, yet exemplify a related perspective of using analogy as a resource to support inventive design with traditional data collection methods.