At the PICNIC Festival 2011, Waag presented a new publication titled 'Users as Designers, a hands-on approach to Creative Research'. Waag has over 16 years of experience in developing creative technologies for social innovation. Users as Designers is the main design philosophy of Waag, where artists, creatives and users have a strong influence on the final results. In our vision, by involving prospective users in the design process, the results are likely to bring better results and that adoption and appropriation of the results become far more likely than by using traditional methods of development.
This publication is the result of a 'book sprint', in which an interdisciplinary team of Waag in one week started the first content editing, supported by illustrators of JAM Visual Thinking. The book consists of two parts; a more theoretical first section that describes why we need a user-centred approach and a practical second part, focusing on the applied aspect of Creative Research.
We like to share our ideas with the world, not only in the hope to spread the use of the Users as Designers methods, but also to improve our own understanding by sharing and learning from the responses. The book is therefore published under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded for free.
Since its publication, the book has already been downloaded 25.000 times (and counting).
Users as Designers, A hands-on approach to Creative Research, 56 pages. ISBN 978-90-806452-0-2. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike license. No trade edition available, free download only.
