As an understanding of users' tacit knowledge and latent needs embedded in user experience has played a critical role in product development, users’ direct involvement in design has become a necessary part of the design process. Various ways of accessing users' tacit knowledge and latent needs have been explored in the field of user-centred design, participatory design, and design for experiencing. User-designer collaboration has been used unconsciously by traditional designers to facilitate the transfer of users' tacit knowledge and to elicit new knowledge. However, what makes user-designer collaboration an effective strategy has rarely been reported on or explored. Therefore, interaction patterns between the users and the designers in three industry-supported user involvement cases were studied. In order to develop a coding system, collaboration was defined as a set of coordinated and joint problem solving activities, measured by the elicitation of new knowledge from collaboration. The analysis of interaction patterns in the user involvement cases revealed that allowing users to challenge or modify their contextual experiences facilitates the transfer of knowledge and new knowledge generation. It was concluded that users can be more effectively integrated into the product development process by employing collaboration strategies to intensify the depth of user involvement.

Liminal sites are those on the verge of change, between boundaries and in a temporary state of ambiguity. Throughout my practice as an architect I was aware of the existence of such spaces. I was also aware that they were rarely the product of my intentional design effort. Because of that to me these spaces were precious. They represent moments in space of ambiguous function and questionable beauty but also moments I sought out everyday. This masters research is my way of refocusing my practice to engage with these types of spaces. The sense that this search will take me outside of my understanding of architecture lead me to chose to undertake it as a masters in landscape architecture. My main research question is: How can a designer construct a liminal site? The research concentrates on four central themes - development of a definition of the term

Abstract In this thesis a new phenomenon called lay participatory design (PD) is described and defined. The work is based on a long-term historical and ethnographic field study in a non-profit community of dog breeders. The case community is committed to the understanding and support of indigenous dogs and their hunting skills through the improvement of breeding knowledge using information technology. This is conceptualized as a user-field-design perspective within a natural cultural historical IT context. The new design mode based on this perspective can be seen as infrastructuring, which integrates the activity, community, and IT. Once in actual use, new knowledge and IT is put into practice in the field, which is the actual focus of the change. As it is practice field-driven, lay PD differs conceptually and theoretically both from conventional and professional IT expertise and IS design models, and from representative-, design- or project-driven approaches to PD and to design ethnography. Because of the traditional division of labour in IS these approaches often take only the professionalized (IT) design as the starting point and ignore the epistemological interests of ordinary people, non-IT-professional users active in their own, everyday domains and in their own participative and collaborative practices in the field of practice. The use-field-design perspective, which is conceptualized in lay PD, is complementing these approaches because it takes seriously ordinary people/users as local designers who are competent with topics, everyday domains, activity and IT located in the related field of practice. The case shows that IT and the core activity of a community can be developed together, and that this co-development is sensible. The results of this study suggest that lay PD concepts can describe essential features of the design process for everyday communities of practice. As a bottom-up form of systems design using everyday knowledge, lay PD can be adopted in other domains and study areas. Thus, lay PD is one new member in the emerging family of Participatory Design, Social Shaping of Technologies, and End User Development-driven systems.