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Background of contextmapping


3levels:

To design innovative products and services, designers need deep insights in the user experiences: emotion, the situation of product use, and social and cultural influences. Within the field of participatory design, a number of techniques have emerged to explore and 'map out' contexts of product use.

pyramide:

Contextmapping is a procedure which includes several research techniques. To access the deeper levels of knowledge, we use several techniques such as generative techniques (Sanders, 2002), cultural probes (Gaver, 1999). With these techniques people are invited, encouraged and stimulated to document parts of their own lives, and thus parts of their experiences. One prominent technique is maketools (Sanders, 2002). People are not aware of all these aspects which influence their experience, and need to reflect on their own experiences to become aware of their experiences. Maketools is a generative technique, in which people make things (e.g. a collage) and tell why they made it like that. By giving them tools to express themselves, they are generating information about their own experiences. Other techniques which can be used in contextmapping studies are cultural probes (Gaver, 1999).

Everyone is expert of his/her experience

This is the basic principle behind the research techniques of contextmapping. When involving users in the design process, their role should be very clear. A role that we want to give users is that they are experts of their experience, and that designers can learn from users by listening and trying to understand their experiences.

map:

Contextmapping literally means mapping the context of product use. All aspects which influence the experience of a product use are part of this contextmap. These can be cultural, physical, social, etc aspects. We use the metaphor of a map to emphasize that designers can use a map to negotiate through the terrain of the user experience. It does not provide a fixed route, but encourages discovery (Stappers and Sleeswijk Visser, 2006).

Last update: Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 2:48:23 PM