User-Centered Design and Creative Prototyping as Means Towards Responsible and Sustainable Technology Design

This presentation will discuss about how the creative prototyping, and especially science fiction prototyping (SFP), has been used for illustrating more abstract user-centered research results. The examples are mainly from industrial design, technology and engineering research (more specifically, from intelligent environment, automation and ecosystem research). In essence, the case studies explore the questions: 1) what aspects in daily life people find important and valuable in the future, 2) what is viable and technically feasible in 5–10-year time-span, and, 3) what is societally important and valuable in future life. By answering to these questions, it is expected that more responsible and sustainable future with technological inventions will be approachable. The presentation will also have a brief overlook on how other creative, future-oriented methods (e.g. reflective design, critical design, speculative design and design fiction) have been applied to different research contexts. In general, the creative methods aim to seek solutions for designers and researchers to stretch their work, or on the other hand, they can be created by other interested parties who want to influence the work of researchers. Apart from the user-centered design, the SFP has been adapted e.g. to the foresight research, in which context the method has been employed for studying evolutionary futures, black swans and weak signals of change, with the assumption that any totalizing predictions of the future will be flawed, biased and ultimately fix specific aspects of the imagined future – and any revolutionary future technology will anyhow defy the mainstream predictions. Conclusively, when discussing about science fiction, the concept of the “co -evolutionary spiral” becomes prevalent. This means that, in general, the science fiction stories told in films and novels often shapes our collective imagination and the course of real-world invention, and these in turn serve as a seed stock for ever more elaborate imaginings