Visit by leading STS scholar Sampsa Hyyslo

Posted on October 1, 2014 by DigiSTIS

We are happy to welcome a long time colleague, Sampsa Hyysalo to Edinburgh bring us up to date on his work programme, and examine the PhD of our own Jee Hyun SUH

Sampsa is Associate professor in co-design at the Aalto School of, Art, Design and Architecture and a Senior Researcher at the Aalto University School of Economics, Helsinki Finland. Sampsa’s research and teaching focus on user involvement in innovation and the co-evolution of technologies, practices and organisations. He also edits the journal Science and Technology Studies.  Sampsa.hyysalo@aalto.fi

Sampsa will give two talks this week.

 Wednesday 1st Oct ISSTI Occasional Public Lecture,

The user dominated technology era: dynamics of dispersed peer-innofusion in Arctic vehicles 

3.30 – 5.30 pm Wednesday 1st October,

Room 183, The University of Edinburgh,  Old College (on the ground floor, on the right side as you enter the the quad)

Abstract

Users invent new products and product categories, but the assumption has been that manufacturers will supplant users if their innovation is of value to many. The current paper examines Russian all terrain vehicles “karakats” to discuss a case of an era of extended user dominated technology and the related dynamics of dispersed peer-innovation. Karakat users have invented, modified, diversified and iterated this technology, as well as continued to self-build and self-maintain it. These vehicles are wide spread, have half a century of history and hundreds of design variants. Manufacturers serve only a small subsection of the market, albeit they have established new markets based on karakat principles. To make sense of the phenomenon, we combine concepts from user innovation research and science & technology studies. We find that the combinatory effect of previously known dynamics related on users in innovation offers a plausible explanation for the user dominance and dispersed peer innofusion pattern, which we elaborate.

Friday 3rd October 9:30-11:00,  Social Informatics Cluster 

Collaborative futuring with and by makers

Sampsa Hyysalo, Cindy Kohtala, Pia Helminen & Samuli Mäkinen

Informatics Forum 

Maker spaces and maker activities are rapidly proliferating and evolving phenomena at the interface of lay and professional design offering access to low-cost digital fabrication equipment. They also come in many varieties and change fast, presenting a difficult target for, for instance, public authorities, who would like to cater for them but operate in much slower planning cycles. As part of participatory planning of Helsinki Central Library, we experimented with a form of collaborative futuring with and by makers. By drawing elements from both lead-user workshops and participatory design we conducted a futuring workshop, which allowed engaging the local maker communities in identifying the issues relevant for public maker space for 2020. It further engaged the participants into envisioning a smaller prototype maker space and invited them into realizing its activities. The workshop results and post evaluation indicate that particularly the gained solution information was of high relevance to library planners, as was the possibility to trial and elaborate activities on a rolling basis in the prototype space. The more general trends in making for 2020 were useful too, but to a lesser extent, and it is likely that just these could have been gained with more traditional futuring means.

Keywords: makers, futuring, lead users, lead-user workshop, participatory design, hands-on future, full scale modeling, extended co-design.

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