Articulating The User : a Discursive-Material Analysis of Humans in Interdisciplinary Design Collaborations

Sammanfattning: Technology design taking place in interdisciplinary collaborations is a complicated process which, due to the nature of available research funding, shapes much of the research that falls under the umbrella of Research through Design (RtD). This dissertation is a meta-study of an EU funded research and innovation project, GIFT, situated in the domain of museum technology and involving multiple partners. The purpose of this Horizon 2020 collaboration was to look at ways to meaningfully incorporate technology in museum context, and included museum institutions, researchers, and commercial partners.The dissertation discusses how the concept of The User, which is central to this form of collaboration, is defined and negotiated both in theory and in practice. Based on three years of fieldwork, and using case study methodology and ethnographic methods, the author investigates how “users” are conceptualized and present in the development cycle of the innovative museum installations developed within the GIFT project. The author problematizes the process on one hand through discourse studies, in particular the theoretical lens of the ´discursive-material knot´, on the other using design theory, with special attention to approach of Johan Redström and his critique of user-centred design. Through observing how The User was defined and negotiated, the thesis contributes to a better understanding of the tensions that underlie interdisciplinary collaborations and articulates possible points of conflict.The results highlight how The User was shaped by a variety of discursive frames throughout the course of the GIFT design processes. Materially, the design and testing process was constrained by multiple factors including the institutional context of an EU project and contributed to how “users” were manifest and reached closure in testing processes. The User was further affected by the established structures it had to accommodate such as for example the logic of academic research and the logic of cultural heritage institutions. The thesis proposes that articulating and sensitising design teams to the inherent tensions between these dimensions provides a possible path towards navigating and potentially resolving some of them.