Making sense of "things"
Trine Heinemann, Stella U. Boess, Jeanette Landgrebe, Robb Mitchell, Maurice Nevile · 2011
We identify an empirical gap in the application of an activity common to Participatory Design and Innovation, namely the tangible workshop. We suggest that tangibles or "things", while often used, remain under investigated in terms of their role in facilitating collaboration in Design and Innovation workshops. Not much is known as yet about how the participants in these workshops might make very different sense of such "things" depending on, for instance, who they are or the physical features of the "things" being employed. We thus propose a research agenda that systematically and empirically explores the role of "things" in design and innovation workshops, which will ensure that we can develop new practices or toolkits for workshops that are informed by empirically generated knowledge of how people make sense of "things".