cooperation and interactive design

This paper focuses on ways and means of stimulating idea generation in collaborative situations involving designers, engineers, software developers, users and usability people. Particularly, we investigate tools of design, i.e. tools used in design to get ideas for a new interactive application and its use. Based on different studies from a research project that we have been involved with over the past three years, we present specific examples of such tools and discuss how they inform design. We frame this discussion through the following (theoretical) considerations: a concern for the past and the present in informing design, for using theory as a source of inspiration in design and for making extremes and multiple voices play a role in innovation. These considerations are used to structure and discuss the examples, illustrating how it is important for such tools to be concrete, tangible and even caricatured