Designerly Tele-Experiences: A New Approach to Remote Yet Still Situated Co-Design

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted processes interaction designers took for granted, challenging some of our most commonplace design practices. Participatory and situated approaches have been impacted the most: where we engaged stakeholders in-person and in-context, during this time we must co-design remotely and in virtual environments. Such a dramatic change calls for new co-design methods. In this article, we present a novel remote strategy for involving stakeholders to co-design interactive technology: Designerly Tele-Experiences (DTE). Our methodological proposal enables participants to experience early design concepts in-the-wild as a provocation to contribute new ideas that resonate with their experiential preferences. Here we describe the rationale for DTE, unpack how it builds on and extends existing methods, and provide actionable guidelines from our experience of using it in our work. Our contribution will empower interaction designers to embrace participatory and situated approaches even when engaging stakeholders in person is not possible or desirable.