Class Readings: User designer

A central objective of participatory design is to reduce the distance between designers and users, and so one interpretation of what happens is that we, through the characteristics of the process, change the people who might be 'users' to also become 'designers'. Although people active in the domain one is designing for certainly possess knowledge about that domain, their ideas about future use is just as much a prediction as anyone else's. Another interpretation is that could suggest an opening, namely that this is an attempt to pass on certain questions about use to the 'user', be it that it is done by bringing people into the design process rather than by leaving them open for future users to answer.