Form-IT

FormIT, an approach to developing IT-based artefacts and services, takes a “human centred” (Kling and Hara 2002) approach to design and build on the humanistic research strategy developed by the User Experience Research Group (UERG) at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (Kankainen and Oulasvirta 2003). As such, FormIT aims to guide and facilitate the development of innovative services that are based on a holistic understanding of people and their behaviour, grounded in needs and wants they experience as relevant, and take seriously issues such equality, empowerment, autonomy, and control in relation to actual use situations.

FormIT has been developed mainly within the context of Botnia Living Lab and the approach is inspired by three theoretical streams; Soft Systems Thinking, Appreciative Inquiry, and Needfinding, (Bergvall-Kåreborn, Holst, and Ståhlbröst 2007). From the first stream, Soft Systems Thinking (Checkland and Holwell, 1998; Checkland and Scholes, 1990), we borrow the assumptions that changes can only occur through changes in mental models. This implies that we need to understand both our own as well as other stakeholders worldviews and we need to be clear about our interpretations and the base on which they are made (Bergvall-Kåreborn and Ståhlbröst 2007; Ståhlbröst and Bergvall-Kåreborn 2007). Hence, we aim to interpret and understand situations through an iterative and interactive process with stakeholders.

The second stream, Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider and Avital 2004; Cooperrider, Whitney, and Stavros 2005; Norum 2001), has encouraged us to start the development cycle with identifying different stakeholders’ dreams and visions of how IT can improve, and support the lives of people. This includes a focus on opportunities, related to specific trends, contexts, or user groups, and, on the positive and life-generating experiences of people. This way of thinking is closely aligned with the philosophy behind SST since it also highlights the importance of people’s thoughts about them selves and the world around in design situations. Hence, instead of starting the process by searching for problems to solve in a situation, we identify what works well and uses this as a basis for design.

The third stream, Needfinding, has two different inspirational sources. The needfinding concept, as such, and its motivation are mainly borrowed from Patnaik and Becker (1999). The main motivators for the needfinding approach are that needs are not highly influenced by trends, hence they are more long lasting. The needs elicitation process, on the other hand, is inspired by (Kankainen and Oulasvirta 2003; Tiitta 2003). These authors inspired us to focus on user needs throughout the development process, and to use these as a foundation for the requirement specification. In our perspective, identifying opportunities is the basis for appreciating needs since needs are opportunities waiting to be exploited. FormIT also strongly emphasise the importance of the first phase in the development cycle usually referred to as analyses or requirements engineering. Since this phase creates the foundation for the rest of the process errors here becomes very hard and expensive to correct in later stages. This is also the phase where users makes the strongest contribution in human centric approaches by actually setting the direction for the design, rather than mainly responding to half finished prototypes. However, since user needs and requirements can change as they gain more knowledge and insights into possible solutions it is important to continually reassess these needs and make sure that needs correlate to given requirements.

In accordance, the FormIT method is iterative and interaction with users is an understood prerequisite. The idea is that knowledge increases through iterative interactions between phases and people with diverse competences and perspectives. In this way knowledge increases through dialogue between participants (Ståhlbröst and Holst 2006). The cross-functional interaction enables the processes of taking knowledge from one field to another to gain fresh insights, which then facilitates innovative ideas. The shared understanding of the situation informs and enriches the learning processes and thus facilitate changes in perspective and lead towards innovative design-processes (Holst and Mirijamdotter 2006). This, in turn, increases our qualifications to design IT-systems which answer to user needs.