A Scandinavian challenge, a US response: methodological assumptions in Scandinavian and US prototyping approaches

• Authors: Clay Spinuzzi
• Venue: Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
• Year: 2002

In the early 1980s, Scandinavian software designers who sought to make systems design more participatory and democratic turned to prototyping. The "Scandinavian challenge" of making computers more democratic inspired others who became interested in user-centered design; information designers on both sides of the Atlantic began to employ prototyping as a way to encourage user participation and feedback in various design approaches. But, as European and North American researchers have pointed out, prototyping is seen as meeting very different needs in Scandinavia and in the US. Thus design approaches that originate on either side of the Atlantic have implemented prototyping quite differently, have deployed it to meet quite different goals, and have tended to understand prototyping results in different ways.These differences are typically glossed over in technical communication research. Technical communicators have lately become quite excited about prototyping's potential to help design documentation, but the technical communication literature shows little critical awareness of the methodological differences between Scandinavian and US prototyping. In this presentation, I map out some of these differences by comparing prototyping in a variety of design approaches originating in Scandinavia and the US, such as mock-ups, cooperative prototyping, CARD, PICTIVE, and contextual design. Finally, I discuss implications for future technical communication research involving prototyping.