Blended Workshops: A Flexible Approach for Practice-centred Design in German Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Within practice-centred computing, working with people to understand and come up with solutions that can support them with their practices is core. This involves using a range of empirical and design methods for understanding the context, elaborating design implications, and devising and evaluating artefacts, both in terms of their usability and the appropriation opportunities that they can offer. When evaluating prototypes in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) we, as researchers, have more than once over a long period of time seen that participants have little time to engage in systematic approaches to co-design. Our experience shows that very often users cannot take part in activities that take longer than two hours, despite their willingness to do so. This suggests that we are in urgent need of more flexible approaches. In this paper we propose the concept of blended workshops as an approach to work with SME workers for the design of digital technologies to support their practices. This approach entails both synchronous and asynchronous activities, focusing on the elaboration of both physical and digital artefacts, which evolves over a longer period of time towards useful socio-technical solutions which can be easily appropriated at the workplace. The asynchronous elements are designed to allow participants to investigate and reflect in their own time and can can be key for stronger and flexible user participation in practice-centred design.