The Envisioment Workshop - From Visions to Practice

Abstract

How do we design for quality in use across design borders between material aspects like spaces, places and equipment and immaterial aspects like organisation and information technology? How can users participate in this process, and how can different design professionals participate and cooperate? We are a group of researchers and designers with a background in architecture, systems design, work psychology, educational drama and physical work environment who have formed a project to explore these questions in practice. We all share a commitment to the idea of participation and have for a long time worked with different visualisation methods and techniques including full-scale modelling, prototyping, animation, role playing and future workshops. In the project Design@Work we have combined our efforts and techniques in an "envisionment workshop" (which also include techniques for virtual reality interaction). This paper focuses on our experiences from the fIrst explorative case study carried out in co-operation with workers, technicians and management at a chemical plant. They were planning to build a new control room, to change the work organisation and to automate part of the production.