Design for me? Charlotte Magnusson 1 , Per-Olof Hedvall 1 , and Björn Breidegard 1 1 Lund University, PO Box 118, 221 00, Lund, Sweden Abstract. In this paper, as a generative contrast to the notion of design “for all”, we present and discuss the potential benefits of a design “for me” approach, where the design process from the starts from, and initially is targeted at, just one person. Given many things developed for a user group or a constructed average user, in this text we describe starting from design for a single user as an alternative approach for achieving useful and useworhty designs. We provide an example from the development of an assistive device as the starting point and discuss how and why this alternative approach should be of interest for everyone interested in usability. Keywords: Design, user-centered, method. 1 Introduction This paper deals with the ever-increasing interest for Design for All and ways of gaining better understanding of different users and their lives. As a generative contrast to the notion of “for all” we present and discuss the potential benefits of a “for me” approach, where the design process from the start and on is targeted at just one person. The research is based on a ten-year development of an assistive communication system for a girl suffering from a severe traumatic brain injury. The tension between “Design for Me” and “Design for All” was initially brought forward by Anderberg [1]. Today there is a range of tools and methods available for anyone who wants to develop usable systems. User centered design [14] has been around for a long time, and participatory design [11], [2], [7], [4] or versions of it is widely used. Usability testing is common practice (as in usability engineering [20]) and there are also more abstract tools such as Personas [8] to help bring developers close to the users. The importance of context has been pointed out [24], and is receiving an increasing amount of attention as more and more applications are developed for mobile devices. Another dominating design approach is represented by the Design for All (European), Universal Design (American) and Inclusive Design (British) family of related approaches. They are strongly rooted in Ergonomics and Human Factors [10] and are based on mainstream solutions in standard products and environments. The goal of Universal Design is to design “products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design” [23]. This focus has strong political overtones and attempts to include the individual while striving for solutions on a broad level [19]. Universal Design rests on the notion that a diversity of people demands a diversity of ways to achieve equal results and