Usuários e projetistas: prática, experiência e percepção

Abstract

This research aims to examine the link between design and production through the interaction between two practices: the operational and design practices. By "operational practice", we refer to the ability to operate, supervise and maintain technological systems. By "design practice", we refer to the ability to design such systems. Both are distinct and important for the production process, although they have very different status and visibility. The design practice tends to be recognized and valued; operational practice tends to be invisible and deprecated when confronted with the design practice. The meeting between the two occurs on the day by day of production in industrial plants, when users - operators - must deal with technological artifacts that are developed by designers for them to operate. When the unexpected happens and machines and technologies do not work as expected, a conflict between the representatives of both practices can occur. The conflict can even be enhanced if the process of creating these artifacts occurred in a "downward" (DUARTE, 2000) way, meaning that there was no integration between users and designers: only a monopoly of designers during the decision-making process (GARRIGOU, 1995). The case we analyzed brings this contrast: first, an industrial technology, built by the "downward" way, presents a malfunction that brings the need to be redesigned. The failure produces, forcibly, a cultural change that gives visibility to operational practice. As a result, a new strategy is adopted for the redesign: to integrate users and designers and encourage discussions and negotiations on the technical aspects of the new technology, in a process called "participatory design" (GARRIGOU, 1995; DANIELLOU, 2005; LIMA, 2014). This research intends to narrate this case study and analyze its implications: how was it possible, in the case studied, to unite actors - operators and designers - with different perspectives and perceptions and design a technology that included collaborations from both? How could an industrial accident generate a cultural change within a company? Which social structures underlie the relationship between operational and design practices? How to deal with a scenario in which representatives of different practices differ technically? In short, this paper aims to analyze the interaction between operators and designers through the contrast between two different methods of design: the downward and participatory.