1 “Our need is to do something about that problem” – Studying how researchers and developers interact with informal carers during an innovation project Marc Steen TNO Information & Communication Technology PO Box 5050, 2600 GB Delft, The Netherlands marc.steen at tno.nl DRAFT – Not to be quoted without the author’s prior permission Paper to be presented at EASST 2006 Conference “Reviewing Humanness” August 23-26, Lausanne, Switzerland (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, http://www.easst.net) Abstract: The author describes one research and development project from the perspective of participant observer. The project team members seek interactions with (future, putative, potential) end-users – in this case: people who provide informal care to a person who suffers from dementia and lives at home – to inspire and inform their innovation project. It is shown that the project had several seemingly redundant activities: there were several series interviews with end-users, and articulating a problem to solve and a solution were repeatedly done. We can argue that these activities were necessary in order to gather “allies”, to create support for the project from the different participating organizations. It is argued that an innovation project is more like a design project, an iterative and messy process, and less like a linear, inductive study that we assume to be typical for engineering or social science. Furthermore, attention is drawn to how project team members apply different methods to understand end-users’ needs and to represent them: to portray them and to act as their spokespersons. The paper closes with exploring one point of critique on science and technology studies, namely that it fails to speak of ethics. It is argued that making design decisions based on interactions with others (end-users or project team members) has ethical qualities, and can be thought of balancing the movements towards otherness (towards end-users or other project team members) and towards the self (project members’ own agendas, approaches and methods). Introduction 1 This paper is about a project in which researchers and developers 2 develop and evaluate innovative information and communication technologies, and it focuses on their attempts to interact with end-users 3 in order to inform or inspire their design decisions 4 . In this paper I study one research and development project, namely the Freeband FRUX project. This project is positioned in the “fuzzy front-end” of innovation (Koen et al. 2002), the early phases of an innovation project, where many options are still open, and the project team members seek interactions with end-users in order to inspire or inform their decisions, e.g. they conduct interviews with putative or potential end-users and invite them for workshops. The idea of interacting with end-users in the very early phases of an innovation project is that these interactions can have a maximum effect on the design process. I critically examine several (implicit) assumptions, e.g. that such interactions straightforwardly or unproblematically lead to better decisions (and, subsequently, to better products, although that falls outside my project’s scope).