Young People in Old Cars - Challenges for Cooperative Design

30 years after the birth of the Scandinavian tradition for system design, a new generation of researchers, are struggling to adapt and reinforce the methodology of cooperative design. We practice user participation in order to improve democracy at work and quality of products, mutual learning in the design process and ‘designing by doing’ in order to promote communication and learning in the design process. In other words, we aim to give cooperative design, which we see as a trusty means for transportation, a well-deserved tune-up to ensure that it will carry us for another decade. On that basis we have set out on a journey to prepare cooperative design to meet the challenges of design and use contexts of the 21s century. This paper marks the departure of this journey.