Review of “User Involvement in Innovation Processes. Strategies and Limitations from a Socio-Technical Perspective”, edited by Harald Rohracher, Profil Verlag München, 2005

Seven men in their thirties are looking in the lens with a grin. They are standing in line behind each other, some of them looking quite wickedly, some more uneasily. What makes the picture interesting is the knowledge that each man stands in a shower cabin, completely naked. One man exposes himself completely; the other men have taken partial refuge in the shower cabins, with different levels of body coverage. What is it that Harald Rohracher had in mind when deciding to put this picture on the cover of his new edited volume? Should these men be seen as ‘users to be involved’, as discussed in his book? Is it to show their vulnerability in front of the lens of Innovation? Are these people Users that can try to hide in the cabins of Consumption, but always have to show at least part of their preferences, values and beliefs to The Producer?

Rohracher’s edited book is about users of technology. In his introduction, he positions his book in the broad knowledge landscape of Science and Technology Studies (STS). He interweaves an extensive literature review of ‘users’ within STS with a preview of the contributions in the book. In doing so, he introduces the four themes the book is organized around. The first theme mainly deals with the representation and configuration of users in design. Stewart & Williams aim at social learning over the complete lifecycle of technology. Looking beyond STS, Jelsma discusses the “fringes” with engineering approaches and other social sciences, as an “heuristic exercise in the field of energy efficiency in households”. Feng gives an account of more empirically grounded work. He reports that in technical standardization committees and procedures, users are nearly invisible. He pleads for a focus on user representations to make presumed user characteristic, preferences and values visible again.

One user characteristic we all have is explored further in the next section that carries the title “Overcoming or Reproducing Gender-Technology Relations?” McLaughlin shows that gender in design and use is shaped by the different roles and views different actors have in an organisational context. The meaning of ‘participation’ and how gender is accounted for in participatory design is explored by Balka. Rommes’ chapter discusses the process through which users escape or change gendered meanings in domesticating ICT.

Part three adds dynamics to such practices of design and use. It is the linkage of producers and users in dynamic innovation processes that may transform systems and regimes. Weber integrates concepts from self-organisation and evolutionary theories in a comprehensive conceptual framework to understand such innovation processes. Based on empirical work, he states that users play an import role in the self-organising process of system transformation. The potential roles of users herein are explored by Guy, Evans and Marvin, showing “competing understanding of identity and roles of users underpinning different styles of transport planning”. Their explorations have led them to the conclusion that “radical technological innovation often serves to reinforce existing social relations of power and exclusion.” The section is ended by Aparicio, who shows how promoters use rhetoric as a form of mediation for such public projects.

The fourth and last theme is introduced by Rohracher as the strategies for active user involvement that actors may apply. This part carries the title “Potentials and Ambivalence of User Participation”. In this block, Hennen discusses the political roles and impacts that different forms of technology assessment can have, including “the involvement of the public (…) as an ongoing experiment in re-arranging the relation of science and technology”. The next author, Konrad, shows the “dilemmas of user involvement in highly dynamic innovation processes.” Designers in such processes have to face the fact that not only users, but also scenarios of use and technology itself are malleable entities. She poses the explicit decision to set one variable fixed as a strategy to get away from the dilemma. “Accordingly, each [of the three strategies] carries specific risks of failure.” Tauritz Bakker reports such a failure. She shows that ideals like accessibility and usability “are not materialized, even when many of the actors involved articulate such ideals and support such design strategies.” Imposing user involvement as one of the external criteria, the earmarking of funds and a reflexive understanding of the design process may be ways to improve chances of materialization of such ideals. Hronszky concludes the edited volume with an investigation of “the problem whether technologies can be better designed through public participation”. His approach is to find “parallelities in participatory approaches in production and public administration”. Besides demonstrating the complexity involved in these approaches, he points out that reflexive processes may even produce actors that could be called ‘anti-consumers’, “ready to resist because they are to be neglected or negatively affected (….).” A co-evolutionary context for emancipation and technological innovation may help to reach a sufficient level of consensus from a ‘precautionary’ point of view.

Criss-crossing his division in four themes, Rohracher identifies several issues the book brings up. User participation can make technology ‘better’, in the sense that it can reveal user aspects that can make technology more ‘useful’, ‘usable’ and ‘used’. (I borrow some terms here that Kornelia Konrad coins in her chapter). However, striving for user involvement is always constrained by organisational and other factors. Both theoretically and empirically, authors show that not only designers but also users often have “room for manoeuvre” to increase chances for fruitful interaction. This does not mean that it is an easy task to make this “room for manoeuvre” operational, even when goals for user involvement are relatively clear in a design project.

Nonetheless, editor and authors do not fall into the trap of glorifying the idea of user involvement, just for the sake of it. Right from the start, user involvement is dismantled as something that is only a ‘good’ thing. The book shows that it can easily turn into a ‘bad’ thing when designers, producers or policy makers apply such interactions to enrol users or citizens for figurative purposes, or if other actors force users to participate unwillingly.

In doing so, the book does not only stage designers and users, but also policy makers and citizens. While reading the book, I encountered quite an ‘interpretative flexibility’ (to paraphrase Bijker) of the notion of ‘user involvement’. On one side of the spectrum, scholars discuss the sometimes implicit representation of users in design processes. On the other side of the spectrum, other scholars use the notion to describe the explicit enrolment of citizens in public discourses about new technological projects. Over the various contributions to the volume, elaborations are made that start from either side. The intriguing thing however is that they hardly meet. What is the relationship between ‘user involvement’ for revealing aspects of technology’s end users, and ‘user involvement’ in decision making processes on the other? Sure, all users are also citizens and all citizens may be users, but how to organize user participation in such a way that the ‘good’ thing (learning about users) can prosper and the ‘bad’ thing (users or citizens being enrolled unwillingly) can be suppressed?

Imre Hronszky’s contribution is the one that comes closest in this respect. Yet, his focus is more on the similarities than on potential differences between participation for policy and participation for product development. His conclusions are not to be criticised, but due to their high-level character, they are difficult to retranslate to a design arena where innovators have to do their daily work.

Thinking this through, I realized that this is not the only thread of inquiry that the book initiates but does not wrap up. The notion of ‘user’ was depicted as problematic in the first two parts of the book, while this is only partially the case in the third part about ‘transforming systems and regimes’. In that section, users are staged as more or less unproblematic entities (Weber), or analysts refrain from confronting the different user configurations they have found in a design context with empirical findings about users in practice (Guy/Evans/Marvin and Aparicio). Furthermore, the book touches upon ‘broader’ societal concerns like democratization, protection of weaker actors and care for the environment, but it does not make clear how to link these to the quest for individual user preferences.

I am not sure whether it is fair to judge this book on the lack of providing more explicit explorations of answers to all these questions. One could see it as quite a virtue that the edited volume has been capable of bringing them to mind in the first place. However, the book has raised expectations beyond what is actually discussed in the chapters. “What role do users have to play in technical innovation processes?” is the opening phrase on the back cover. Such a question turns the empirical question ‘how is user participation performed’ into a normative one: how should it be done? And in his introduction, Rohracher states: “is there a potential for a more active and explicit involvement of users in the design and assessment of technologies? Will technologies become socially and environmentally friendlier with user participation?” The book only has been partially capable of answering these questions, because the elements in these questions have not been sufficiently linked together. If the editor or another contributing author would have taken up the different threads of the book, and taken insights one step further, the book could have been of greater value. This could have been done by making pros and cons of user involvement in their different forms more explicit and discussing the linkages more systematically. It remains somewhat unclear where we stand now, both intellectually and from a normative stance. This does not mean several scholars in the edited volume have not touch upon the normative issue in their concluding remarks. To my opinion, however, they hesitate to openly cross no-man’s-land between ‘STS theory’ and ‘what to do’. ‘Keep practice and analyses separated’ still seems to be the guiding principle for good scholarship. What are left are general remarks about possibilities for intervention for user involvement. As a reader, I felt somewhat burdened with a puzzle which I felt the book should have solved for me, at least partially. Yes, the book has taught me that ‘user involvement’ has its drawbacks. At the same time, however, I still experienced a bias towards ‘user participation’ as something we should still strive for, but authors forgot to tell why that was again. If we agree ‘proper’ user involvement is a mammoth task indeed, this feels a bit like a shortcut.

Where the book does excel is in its broad coverage and exploration of the notion of ‘user involvement in innovation processes’ in all its varieties. In this respect, this edited book has more than fulfilled the promise the subtitle of the book phrases. Authors have provided substantial empirical evidence of ongoing practices of user participation, hereby showing “strategies and limitations from a socio-technical perspective” for “user involvement in innovation processes”. In this respect, the photo on the cover is appropriate. Users, citizens, and designers, policy makers: nobody can hide in the shower cabins anymore. The book has made clear that they all have to meet in front of the lens of Innovation, in all their vulnerability.