Towards Empowering Design Practises

Design of future smart environments (and services and products included in these environments) requires agile and stakeholder involved methodologies for the greater success among targeted user populations. Furthermore the factors affecting to the design decisions in the future are sundry and in many cases frequently in conflict. Currently user and usability studies are conducted in order to get better effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction and user acceptance for new products and services. Even though the design approach is called human-centred or user-centred the design of new products and services has been quite technology or market driven in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) business. Instead of putting technology or market to the core of design process and product development the human needs and values should form the fundamental basis of design. Human Driven Design (HDD) refers to the design approach which broadens the perspective from focused product or service development process model to the more holistic design perspective. Stakeholder Based Design approach (SBD) furthermore broadens the scope and role of involved participant groups in the actual design process. Integrating HDD and SBD includes inevitably ethical assessment of design process and artifacts while trade offs in design have to be well justified. Hence HDD and SBD call for new Empowering Design (ED) practices which could accomplish more deliberative but still agile approach to design of future smart environments.