Yvonne Dittrich and Pernille Bjørn were invited for a workshop at one of the world leading universities in India, at which user-centric design and research were compared across different cultural settings.

The workshop concluded a cooperative project between Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) and the TeNeT group at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (IITM) and outlined a number of future research themes.

The Workshop brought together industry, engineers, social scientists and project managers in the field of ICT’s for a discussion on the role and methods of Participatory Design (PD). The participants were scholars from BTH, Lund University, IT-University of Copenhagen, TeNeT Group, as well as faculty of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments of the IITM, and project managers from Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI) in Chennai. From the Industry - Ericsson India and Chennai were both represented and some RTBI and TeNeT companies like Uniphore and Invention Labs & Vortex Eng were represented.

The workshop addressed the situatedness of user-centered design practices. Through the comparison of Indian and Swedish user-centric design cases, the understanding and methodological support of collaborative design and development practices in cultural diverse settings was discussed.

Yvonne Dittrich will spend 3 months in fall with the Computer Science department of the IITM and the RTBI.

For further information see http://www.bth.se/exr/india.nsf/pages/pd-workshop