Designing for ephemerality and prototypicality
Susanne Bødker, Ellen Christiansen · 2004
As a context for IT design, flexible work presents a new challenge. Ways of working tend to be prototypical, habits are forming slowly and work is carried out everywhere. Even when applying ethnographic methods, it is difficult to capture the ephemerality and prototypicality of cooperative work that Grudin claims must be preserved through design. Through a discussion of a design project dedicated to the design of support for social awareness, we reflect on the means of design - scenarios and prototypes, and their ability to support design for ephemerality and prototypicality. Our conclusion is that by using scenarios as boundary objects, in multiple prototyping experiments, they support the negotiation and boundary understanding of design ideas, rather than one or more solutions. Hence it becomes possible to design to preserve ephemerality and prototypicality.