Paper short abstract:

User involvement has changed significantly since early 2000s when it rose to prominence in S&TS agenda. Based on a recent major volume, we elaborate the key changes in the emerging strategies and approaches to user involvement in business and citizen contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Behind the steady stream of new products, technologies, systems and services in our modern societies there is a prolonged and complicated battle around the role of users. How should designers get to know the users' interests and needs? Who should speak for the users? How may designers collaborate with users and in what ways may users take innovation into their own hands?

User involvement has changed significantly since early 2000s when it rose to prominence in S&TS agenda. The presentation discusses the emerging involvement strategies and innovation collectives that amount to "new production of users" in business and citizen contexts. Based on a recent major volume, it analyses the challenges in the practical collaborations between designers and users and investigates a number of cases, where groups of users collectively took charge of innovation. It further links these the history of designer-user relations from the era of mass production to the present days.

The key messages from recent S&TS scholarship to the study of users are fourfold. First it has become a 'fact of life' that users have significant productive capabilities, and these are exercised widely in society. Second, user involvement has become a key object of industrial strategizing: efforts to produce productive users. Third, active users, designers and managers all operate in a landscape where the methods and resources for user involvement are widely available. Fourth, empowerment through user involvement can still happen, but not by default.