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Contextual Design is a user-centered design process that uses in-depth field research to drive innovative design. Contextual Design was first invented in 1988 and has since been used in a wide variety of industries and taught in universities all over the world. It is a complete front-end design process rooted in Contextual Inquiry, the widespread, industry-standard field data gathering technique. Contextual Design adds techniques to analyze and present user data, drive ideation from data, design specific product solutions, and iterate those solutions with customers.

In 2013, we overhauled the method to account for the way that technology has radically changed people’s lives since the invention of the touchscreen phones and other always-on, always-connected, and always-carried devices. This book describes the new Contextual Design, evolved to help teams design for the way technology now fits into peoples’ lives. We briefly describe the steps of the latest version of Contextual Design and show how they create a continual immersion in the world of the user for the purpose of innovative product design.

Table of Contents: Introduction / Design for Life / Field Research: Data Collection and Interpretation / Consolidation and Ideation: The Bridge to Design / Detailed Design and Validation / Conclusion / References / Author Biographies

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This book focuses on design of work from the human-factors (HF) perspective. In the approach referred to as Core-Task Design (CTD), work is considered practice, composed of human actors, the physical and social environment, and the tools used for reaching the actors’ objectives. This book begins with consideration of an industrial case, the modernization of a nuclear power plant automation system, and the related human-system interfaces in the control room. This case illustrates generic design dilemmas that invite one to revisit human-factors research methodology: Human factors should adopt practice as a new unit of analysis and should accept intervention as an inherent feature of its methodology. These suggestions are put into practice in the CTD approach, according to which three general design functions are performed, those being:

• understand-to-generalize—empirical analysis of the work at hand,

• foresee-the-promise—creation of concepts for future work, and

• intervene-to-develop—participatory development and design of work.

For fulfillment fulfillment of each of the design functions, several CTD methods are introduced. The methods are aimed at modeling the core task and analyzing how the actors actually take the core task features into account in order to achieve balance between potentially conflicting demands in action. Thereby, new understanding of the core task is acquired. Further methods focus on projecting the roles and functionality of technologies in the future work and on implementing changes to the work. Specific studies of the nuclear power plant’s control-room renewal constitute an example demonstrating a core task and the associated methods. We argue that the CTD approach offers clear utility for the design of future technology, work, and everyday services and environments.

CTD utilizes achievements of practice theory in the social sciences to generate a creative synthesis of Cognitive Work Analysis, semiotic analysis of practice, and the cultural-historical theory of activity. Core-Task Design facilitates dialogue among human-factors experts, design engineers, and end users in their joint development of work. The intended audience of this book is students, researchers, and practitioners of human factors, industrial art and design, and instrumentation and control-system design.

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he Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory (EDC) is a long-term research platform exploring immersive socio-technical environments in which stakeholders can collaboratively frame and solve problems and discuss and make decisions in a variety of application domains and different disciplines.

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This book is about how people (we refer to them as practitioners) can help guide participants in creating representations of issues or ideas, such as collaborative diagrams, especially in the context of Participatory Design (PD). At its best, such representations can reach a very high level of expressiveness and usefulness, an ideal we refer to as Knowledge Art. Achieving that level requires effective engagement, often aided by facilitators or other practitioners. Most PD research focuses on tools and methods, or on participant experience. The next source of advantage is to better illuminate the role of practitioners-the people working with participants, tools, and methods in service of a project’s larger goals. Just like participants, practitioners experience challenges, interactions, and setbacks, and come up with creative ways to address them while maintaining their stance of service to participants and stakeholders. Our research interest is in understanding what moves and choices practitioners make that either help or hinder participants’ engagement with representations. We present a theoretical framework that looks at these choices from the experiential perspectives of narrative, aesthetics, ethics, sensemaking and improvisation and apply it to five diverse case studies of actual practice.

Table of Contents: Acknowledgments / Introduction / Participatory Design and Representational Practice / Dimensions of Knowledge Art / Case Studies / Discussion and Conclusions / Appendix: Knowledge Art Analytics / Bibliography / Author Biographies

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This book presents a contextual approach to designing contemporary interactive mobile computer systems as integral parts of ubiquitous computing environments. Interactive mobile systems, services, and devices have become functional design objects that we care deeply about. Although their look, feel, and features impact our everyday lives as we orchestrate them in concert with a plethora of other computing technologies, these artifacts are not well understood or created through traditional methods of user-centered design and usability engineering. Contrary to more traditional IT artifacts, they constitute holistic user experiences of value and pleasure that require careful attention to the variety, complexity, and dynamics of their usage. Hence, the design of mobile interactions proposed in this book transcends existing approaches by using the ensemble of form and context as its central unit of analysis. As such, it promotes a designerly way of achieving convergence between form and context through a contextually grounded, wholeness sensitive, and continually unfolding process of design.