Playing with Fire: User-Centered Design of Wearable Computing for Emergency Response

This paper presents an approach of using game-like techniques to engage firemen from the Paris Fire Brigade into a participatory design process of wearable computing for emergency response. The approach is motivated by explaining the specific difficulties of the domain and technology and by explaining how to address them in a user-centered design approach featuring multiple prototyping steps. A multiplayer virtual reality computer game is one of these techniques. The paper shows how the design of the computer game is informed and validated by other techniques and how it can be used successfully to simulate certain characteristics of the domain and the technologies that are relevant for design. As such we present it as a tool to mediate and facilitate the collaboration of technology providers and users, empowering end-users to leverage their domain expertise to explore, assess and design well-fitting solutions in a creative, reflective and enjoyable collaborative process.