How can stories get translated into future artefacts ?

At CID (the Centre for User Oriented IT-design at The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm) several series of workshops has been conducted in different kinds of projects (Westerlund 2003, 2005b). The workshops were used to create design ideas and to acquire understanding of presumptive users’ needs and desires (Lindquist 2004). The different projects have involved families, distributed workers, people with different kinds of disabilities, elderly people and their caretakers. In most of these projects the workshop method has been one of several methods used to construct knowledge of the design space, i.e. possible meaningful solutions (Westerlund, 2005a). Over a period of six years well over 30 workshops have been conducted, each with 10-25 participants and lasting around five hours.