How to Troubleshoot Apps for the Modern Connected Worker
INUSE Seminar Eija Kaasinen
1. Design for Life – Renewing Human-
centred design to benefit business,
organizations and people’s lives
INUSE Seminar
26.9.2013
Eija Kaasinen
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
2. 226/09/2013
Contents of the presentation
Something about VTT and VTT’s programme portfolio
Design for life programme
Design for life white paper
Renewal needs on four areas
Understanding future consumer
Coping with complexity in design
User experience driven business
Innovation through co-design
3. 326/09/2013
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
VTT IS
a globally networked multitechnological applied research organisation
a not-for-profit and impartial research centre
VTT HAS
extensive cross-disciplinary technological and business expertise
unique research infrastructure
comprehensive global partnership networks in business,
industrial and research communities
VTT CREATES
new technology and science-based innovations
in co-operation with domestic and foreign
partners
4. 426/09/2013
Customer sectors
Biotechnology, pharma-
ceutical and food industries
Chemical industry and
environment
Electronics
Energy
Forest industry
ICT
Machine, vehicle and metal
industries
Real estate and construction
Services and logistics
Focus areas of research
Applied materials
Bio- and chemical processes
Energy
Information and
communication technologies
Industrial systems
management
Microtechnologies and
electronics
Services and the built
environment
Business research
VTT’s operations
Research and Development
Strategic Research
Business Solutions
Business Development
Group Services
VTT’s companies
- VTT Expert Services Ltd (incl.
Labtium Ltd and Enas Ltd)
- VTT Ventures Ltd
- VTT International Ltd (incl.
VTT Brasil LTDA)
- VTT Memsfab Ltd
VTT Group in brief
Turnover 316 M€ (2012) • Personnel 3,206 (31.12.2012)
5. 526/09/2013
VTT’s mission
VTT produces research and
innovation services that
enhance the international
competitiveness of companies,
society and other customers.
VTT creates the prerequisites
for society’s sustainable
development, employment
and wellbeing.
6. 626/09/2013
VTT’s programme portfolio 2013
Spearhead programmes 2013
Green Solutions for Water and Waste – Mona Arnold
Bioeconomy Transformation – Jussi Manninen
Productivity Leap with Internet of Things – Heikki Ailisto
Smart Mobility and Low Carbon Energy – Nils-Olof Nylund
Innovation Programmes 2013
Intelligent Energy Grids – Robert Weiss
High-performance Microsystems – Aarne Oja
Multiscale Design – Tarja Laitinen
Arctic and Cold Climate Solutions – Jaakko Heinonen
Cognitive Communications for Critical Infrastructures – Mika Lasanen
Personalised Health & Wellbeing - Miikka Ermes
Human Driven Design – “Design for Life” – Eija Kaasinen
Safe and Sustainable Nuclear Energy - Eija Karita Puska
Sensing Solutions – Mikko Juuti
7. 726/09/2013
Design for life research background at VTT
VTT has wide human-driven research
competence, distributed in several
knowledge centres at VTT.
Human-driven research teams at VTT
have identified common research
drivers. By orchestrating VTT’s
competences to solve the common
challenges, we can create world class
solutions.
Design for life research activities cover different
research areas at VTT
• Technologies and services for buildings
• Transport and logistics systems
• Systems engineering
• Business and technology management
• Organisations, networks and innovation systems
• Systems research
• Smart interaction solutions
• Digital service research
8. 826/09/2013
Design for life research fields
Objectives:
Taking human well-being and
values as the driving forces for
better productivity and competitive
advantage
Empowering people to influence
their living and working
environments.
Finding solutions to big societal
challenges together
Creating enjoyable service
ecosystems
Enabling human control of
complexity
User experience
and value formation
Design and
development of
complex
socio-technical
systems
Co-innovation
and co-design
User experience
and value in use
Future
contexts of living
and working, and
impacts of
technology
Innovation
Design
Business and
organization
Social
Science
9. 926/09/2013
Design for Life projects make the programme ...
...the entity takes shape
only once the pieces are
put together.
Design for life programme entity
consists of more than 30 individual
research projects that work towards
the common research objectives
10. 1026/09/2013
Design for life White Paper
In the increasingly technology-mediated world, successful design
solutions need to be appropriate to their purposes, fit for human
lives, and promote well-being.
The focus of the design activities has extended from individual
products to continuously evolving ecosystems that consist of
human actors in different roles, technical solutions and physical
environments.
In the complex design environment traditional human-centred
design methods meet their limits and there is a threat that we
cannot influence the design sufficiently from human viewpoint.
Design for life White Paper proposes four areas where Human-
centred design should be renewed to benefit business,
organizations and people’s lives
11. 1126/09/2013
Design for life challenges
Coping with
complexity
Innovation
through
co-design
User experience
driven business
Future
consumer
12. 1226/09/2013
Four areas that need renewal
Understanding future consumers and their contexts of living and working as well as
value and impacts of technology. Consumer studies must be more future oriented to
support the design of future services.
Coping with complexity by developing systemic approaches and shared methods to
design, based on understanding the interdependencies between technologies and social
practices.
Utilising the innovation potential of users and other stakeholders as co-design partners
by developing understanding of the collaborative processes of knowledge creation and
innovation.
Creating the organizational mindset for user experience driven business. Utilizing the
full potential of user experience requires changing the mindset of the whole organization
in addition to adopting user experience driven design practises.
13. 1326/09/2013
Understanding future consumers
Research in this area includes three perspectives:
Consumer understanding: Research that aims to
understanding consumer activity, culture and values
Foresight activities that aim to capture impacts of societal
and technological transformation on consumer behaviour and
values in the future
Reflective approaches that address consumer behaviour,
innovation and technology design from the viewpoint of ethics,
responsibility and sustainability.
14. 1426/09/2013
Research needs for Understanding future consumer
Creating a knowledge pool of future consumer behaviour, values
and cultures in contexts of living and working
Applying foresight methods to capture impacts of technology and
societal transformation on consumer behaviour. This knowledge
can be used to inspire design, development and business from the
angle of human well-being.
Understanding human activity to identify and frame unsolved
problems. We shall gather, integrate and analyse research
knowledge which reveals future challenges for organisations to
tackle in a proactive manner.
15. 1526/09/2013
Coping with complexity in design
Complex socio-technical systems are everywhere in the modern society: the
entirety of the healthcare system, the food chain “from farm to fork”, energy
systems, emergency services, global service business etc.
Complexity is an intrinsic feature of these systems, especially due to the needs for:
balancing between multiple global challenges like well-being, safety, security,
environmental and social sustainability
adapt to situational variations in the operative environment, i.e. the systems
need to be resilient
building ecologies of systems: they are systems of systems that are
developing both based on design activities and by usage practices
For a large part, the complex socio-technical systems of today are not designed per
se. Instead, they emerge in an interplay of different stakeholders developing their
own parts of the system. Thus the systemic entity, the complex whole, may remain
completely un-designed and thus its functioning may become ambiguous or
unpredictable.
16. 1626/09/2013
Research needs for Coping with complexity in design
Systemic design practice which understands the
interdependencies between technologies and social practices
Understanding human activity, decision-making and use of tools in
real-life situations, and development of appropriate ethnographic
and experimental methods
Methods and practices of developing perspectives of socio-
technical transformations and their long term impacts
17. 1726/09/2013
Innovation through co-design
Since products and services are more and more tied together in
bigger service ecosystems, companies cannot survive in the
competitive markets without collaborating with other stakeholders.
Co-design refers to collaborative design activities with customers
or other stakeholders across the whole span of the design process.
Users are the experts of their everyday life and can therefore bring
new insights into the innovation process and increase designers’
understanding of real user needs and desires. Early user
involvement reduces costs later and leads to better user
acceptance of new products and services. Co-design also helps in
creating a closer relationship with customers.
For companies, it is challenging to find the customer innovators
and establish links with them in a cost-effective manner. User
participation in the global context is a particular challenge.
18. 1826/09/2013
User involvement in design
Human-centred design of
products of services
Continuous
development during
use
Fuzzy front end:
What to design?
Wide possibilities to
influence; radical ideas
Established design
practises and tools
(ISO 9241-210)
A necessity in service
business; developing both
technology and usage
practises
20. 2026/09/2013
Open Web Lab, Owela
Innovating, developing and testing future
products and services together with end
users
Researching users, needs, attitudes,
opinions, and usage cultures
Evaluating the acceptability of ideas,
scenarios and prototypes
User-designer interaction channel in Living
Lab environments
Over 2500 registered Owela users, part of
them lead users in ideation
Project space can be open or closed to
selected users
21. 2126/09/2013
Research needs for Innovation through co-design
Development of easy and cost-efficient methods that companies
can use themselves for integrating co-design in their innovation
and design processes.
Measuring the actual benefits of different co-design approaches.
Integration of different co-design approaches into a comprehensive
“Finnish co-design” brand.
22. 2226/09/2013
User experience driven business
The meaning of user experience for companies is quite widely
recognized, but it is rarely seen as a strategic or business issue.
Emphasizing the importance of UX throughout the
product/service/customer relationship life cycle could provide
means to differentiate and thus increase the competitive advantage
We have tools to evaluate user experience but user experience
has been a too vague concept to guide design activities
23. 2326/09/2013
Research needs for User experience driven business
More extensive research is needed on how organisational
practices and culture can be transformed to support UX-orientation
in the companies and on how UX can act as a business factor.
Define and establish UX driven design process based on concrete,
focused UX targets, as well as related methods and tools.
