Designing Digital Futures - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 25

Another serious limitation of design methods is that they limit the scope
for imagination and creativity. Cooper (1999) observes that “ when engineers
invent, they arrive at their solution through a succession of practical, pos-
sible steps .” Because of this, their solution will always be a derivative of
the old, beginning solution. What happens through successive iterations of
prototyping and evaluation is that, while unsatisfactory qualities and fea-
tures may be eliminated, it is harder to ensure that novel and desirable
qualities and features are 'designed in'. To do this requires a different strat-
egy from the conventional systems analysis approach - one which begins
not with analysis but with imagination, and which encourages the widest
exploration of opportunities and possibilities before commitment.
2.6 Did Anybody Ever Ask Us?
Our disappointment and frustration with the shortcomings of ICT are per-
haps exacerbated by the underlying sense that we can't remember anyone
ever asking us if we really wanted all these amazing widgets - nor were
we told of the price we would have to pay in frustration, lost time, and loss
of control over aspects of our own lives. We were never consulted about
the desirability, the dangers, the consequences, what we might have been
able to have instead, how we might want to interface with the technology,
what we would like it to do most, and how much we wanted to pay for it.
We have accepted what has been provided, awed by the wonder of techno-
logical progress and the immense capabilities now in our hands.
2.7 Conclusions
In this chapter we have briefly reviewed the evolution of the design proc-
esses which underpin the development and implementation of ICTs and
their use by a growing range of people. We conclude from this examina-
tion that, despite the high cost of failing to engage citizens, active practice
of citizen engagement in the design of ICTs is still very limited. We have
observed that the expansion of the user population, beyond the confines of
the employment sector to now include all citizens in our society, has
stimulated a growth in inclusive design methods and tools. Yet most of the
approaches in use are not participative in nature - even those which have
the explicit objective of achieving inclusivity through the resultant design
outcomes. Moreover, the focus of design effort continues to be on techno-