Scenarios in user-centred design-setting the stage for reflection and action

This paper will discuss three examples of use of scenarios in user-centred design. The examples are from projects that the author has been involved with. Common to them are the use of scenarios to support the tensions between reflection and action, between typical and critical situations, and between plus and minus situations. The paper will illustrate how a variety of more specific scenarios emphasising, for example, critical situations, or even caricatures of situations are very useful for helping groups of users and designers being creative in design. Emphasising creativity in design is a very different view on the design process than normally represented in usability work or software/requirements engineering, where generalising users' actions are much more important than the, in this paper, suggested richness of and contradiction between actual use situations. In general the paper proposes to attune scenarios to the particular purposes of the situations that they are to be used in, and to be very selective based on these purposes.