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Chapter 3. Pilot Studies: Lessons Learned from Early Projects
extrapolate. In retrospective, cooperation with other stakeholders from the hospital
domain, such as hospital management and insurance agents, could have revealed
di erent and, possibly, more valuable input for the project. Furthermore, those
parties would not have been the immediate users such that their openness to more
radical concept changes is probably larger.
3.5 Towards a New Form of
Developer-User Cooperation
This chapter described two projects we have conducted initially. Firstly, the proac-
tive furniture had the objective to develop an application that allows to convey the
vision of ubiquitous computing and the Smart-Its project. As such the project was
very successful. However, later the complete neglection of the user during the devel-
opment process turned out to be problematic: The furniture-system was “neat” but
not that well-grounded in reality that it could make sense to deploy it. This finding
suggests to develop inspiring prototypes which have to be incrementally inspected
with experts from the domain and continuously refined.
Secondly, the wearable-assistant project was conducted in cooperation with future
users, medical doctors, right from the beginning. Following the paradigm of user-
centered design an extensive observation session of the users and several meeting
sessions with the users were conducted. However, the result turned out to be diverse.
On the one hand a very detailed understanding of the doctor’s practices could be
obtained, but on the other hand we, as developers, stuck too much with the users.
The emerging ideas were either not far-reaching, contradicting our goals but useful
in the perspective of the doctors, or far-reaching but could not be accepted by the
users.
According to these two extreme experiences – development completely without the
users and development in total cooperation with the user – we realized that both
do not work well. When looking for advanced ubiquitous and wearable computing
applications, best practices of both approaches should rather be synthesized to a
compromise. Developers must not neglect the users as they are required for ground-
ing an idea in reality. However, users have to break with current routines in order to
free the mind for new innovations that radically depart from the status quo. Users
have to be stimulated to break established boundaries. Furthermore, developers
have to team-up with other stakeholders that can o er additional perspectives. A
complementary partnership is the key, where developers create concepts together
with users instead of in isolation from them. That means, one has to integrate the
di erent objectives of developer and user into the development process for achieving
the common goal: Development of an innovative application. Last but not least, the
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