Central to multi-stakeholder processes of participatory innovation is to generate knowledge about 'users' and to identify business opportunities accordingly. In these processes of collaborative analysis and synthesis, conflicting perceptions within and about a field of interest are likely to surface. Instead of the natural tendency to avoid these tensions, we demonstrate how tensions can be utilized by embodying them in provocative types (provotypes). Provotypes expose and embody tensions that surround a field of interest to support collaborative analysis and collaborative design explorations across stakeholders. In this paper we map how provotyping contributes to four related areas of contemporary Interaction Design practice. Through a case study that brings together stakeholders from the field of indoor climate, we provide characteristics of design provocations and design guidelines for provotypes for participatory innovation.

Design researchers have an important role to play when engaged with user-driven design projects in industry. Design researchers can craft ethnographic material to facilitate transfers of user-knowledge to industry, and demonstrate how this material can be used in the design of new products and services. However, ethnographic findings can reveal issues that are in tension with conceptions of the project members from industry. Instead of brushing these tensions aside, we propose provotyping (provocative prototyping) as an approach to constructively build on them as a resource for change. Provotypes are ethnographically rooted, technically working, robust artefacts that deliberately challenge stakeholder conceptions by reifying and exposing tensions that surround a field of organisational interest. The daily and local experience of provotypes aims to stir dialectical processes of reflection on how conceptions currently are, and fuel the front end of a development process by speculating how conceptions could be different. In this article we start by making explicit the relation between provotypes, practices of critical design and organisational sense-making. We then illustrate, through a multi-stakeholder project concerning the field of indoor climate, how provotypes facilitate transfers of user knowledge to industry, and how they contribute to the development of new products and services. We end by framing the role of the design researcher and discuss the politics that are inherent to design provocations.

“The Cube” is a unique facility that combines 48 large multi-touch screens and very large-scale projection surfaces to form one of the world’s largest interactive learning and engagement spaces. The Cube facility is part of the Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) newly established Science and Engineering Centre, designed to showcase QUT’s teaching and research capabilities in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines. In this application paper we describe, the Cube, its technical capabilities, design rationale and practical day-to-day operations, supporting up to 70,000 visitors per week. Essential to the Cube’s operation are five interactive applications designed and developed in tandem with the Cube’s technical infrastructure. Each of the Cube’s launch applications was designed and delivered by an independent team, while the overall vision of the Cube was shepherded by a small executive team. The diversity of design, implementation and integration approaches pursued by these five teams provides some insight into the challenges, and opportunities, presented when working with large distributed interaction technologies. We describe each of these applications in order to discuss the different challenges and user needs they address, which types of interactions they support and how they utilise the capabilities of the Cube facility

This paper illustrates the complexity of pointing as it is employed in a design workshop. Using the method of interaction analysis, we argue that pointing is not merely employed to index, locate, or fix reference to an object. It also constitutes a practice for reestablishing intersubjectivity and solving interactional trouble such as misunderstandings or disagreements by virtue of enlisting something as part of the participants’ shared experience. We use this analysis to discuss implications for how such practices might be supported with computer mediation, arguing for a “bricolage” approach to systems development that emphasizes the provision of resources for users to collaboratively negotiate the accomplishment of intersubjectivity rather than systems that try to support pointing as a specific gestural action.

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is an increasingly prominent topic in CSCW. From telepresence systems through field robots for extreme missions to social robots in homes, HRC is becoming a recurring theme across a broad range of CSCW research. Based on the growing interest, we explore the coupling of the field of CSCW and research on robotics at this critical time. This paper presents a primary and secondary literature review of CSCW proceedings and venues for robotics research. We identified 29 CSCW papers that contribute to the body of HRC research and analyse the foundations on which these papers rely. Then, we identified 138 papers published in robotics outlets that either (1) cite one or more CSCW papers, or (2) use the term CSCW. We discuss how CSCW is currently contributing to HRC research through five research topics: Sociomateriality, teamwork, awareness, embodiment, and communication. The paper contributes by offering three key future pathways for expanding this area of research, outlining questions and gaps that have yet to be explored for (1) expanding the application domains and diversifying robot types for HRC, (2) methodological implications for HRC, and (3) learning from human collaboration.