Designing Digital Futures - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 23

of the design process, and that achieving a sound understanding of users'
needs in turn required some interaction with users. It was also recognized
(sometimes explicitly, sometimes as a by-product) that interaction with
users helped to create user 'buy-in' which was an important element in
successful systems implementations. But such engagement was typically
confined to a small sample of users, who were relatively easy to identify
because much of the systems development activity was targeted at 'be-
spoke' systems built for specific applications within individual organisa-
tions. User involvement was also typically confined to specific points in
the design process, e.g. as part of the requirements definition process once
the initial computer system had been scoped, and then again in user testing
of prototype and final versions of the developed system. Users therefore
had little opportunity to influence the scoping, planning and overall shap-
ing of the systems, or to explore alternative options and their conse-
quences. Yet at the level of the individual user, their experience of existing
technologies and products will influence and constrain their expectations
about the “ shape ” of future technologies and products.
An exception to this 'ping pong' approach to user involvement occurs in
participative ICT design approaches, which have been adopted by a rela-
tively small number of ICT design projects. Mumford, a pioneering advo-
cate of participative design, who developed a method called ETHICS
(1983) in response to the limitations of existing approaches summarizes
her perceptions thus: “ my interest in changing system design practice was
stimulated by observing the bad human effects of many early computer sys-
tems. Work was frequently routinized and controls tightened as a result of
the new technology. Systems analysts, as designers were called then, ap-
peared to have little understanding of the human consequences of their
work. The difficulties of technical design appeared to displace any concern
for human feelings.…When computers first appeared in the offices in the
late 1950s and 60s, their costs and limitations meant that they were often
introduced in an authoritarian manner. 'This is what we can provide and
you must have it' was a common technical attitude. Then as user resis-
tance was encountered, strategies changed to a soft sell approach: 'This is
what we can offer and it is just what you want.' Overselling of poor sys-
tems led to user scepticism and gradually analysts began to realise that
they need to talk to users before producing a product: 'We think we know
what you want but we'd like to discuss this with you'. This led to the prac-
tice of interviews with single users ” (in Schuler 1993).
The need for designing systems around the needs of users (human-
centered design) is now well accepted by the design community (and in-
deed is embodied in standards such as ISO 13407 Human Centred Design
Processes for Interactive Systems 1999). But, as Clement and Van den