Within the context of everyday creativity, there is a growing demand for new systems, products and services that mediate such activity. Some of these tools are emerging from commercial design worlds (iPhone apps, sound and image production software, etc.) and some from creative communities/academia (interactive storytelling tools, new programming tools for interactive artworks, physical computing devices, etc.). Across the design disciplines, and from academia to industry, practicing user research is becoming an increasingly important activity informing the design and development of any product, system or service. Whilst our understanding of the methods and techniques available for generating user research is maturing, the understanding of how to leverage its insights effectively is less well developed. Does user research within the design process in itself incubate or quash creativity and innovation? Is there such a thing as 'too data-driven design'? Can researchers (or those practicing research) be educated for depth of insight, not just method? By the same token, how can we be sure that the user research is actionable? What is the best way to communicate user research? Or is co-development and integrated user research the way to go anyway? What role does user research play in the overall development process? Is user research something best gathered from users or generated with users? Do different communities (e.g. academia and industry) define 'valid user research' in the same ways?

As Brenda Laurel noted as far back as 1992, the operation of computers has always been a performative activity (Laurel, 1992). A system’s state changes as a computer runs through a program acting out the tasks specified in the script of a program. With interactive systems, human actors take their place on stage alongside computers, performing activities with and through such systems. The recent emergence of ubiquitous and tangible computing moves the stage of the interaction from the virtuality of the screen to the physical environment. This provides opportunities to address performative interactions that include bodily movements to create novel multimodal approaches. For interaction designers, this requires thinking about interaction in a different way, for example considering the role of the body, beyond ergonomics, for its increased relevance as a presentational, representational and experiential medium. Recently there has been a growing interest in developing interaction design methods that more explicitly recognise and exploit the performative elements and potentials of design activity itself.

Diaper's critical review of Carrol's book ‘Making Use’ raises a number of interesting issues about how to set about the design of interactive systems. In particular Diaper poses an issue that has long dogged the area of Human–Computer Interaction and Software Engineering (HCI-SE), namely how to deal with the formality required by the SE side and the sensitivity to context required by the HCI side. In this paper, we report on the experience of using scenario-based design and reflect on the effectiveness of the approach. This work fits into a broader context concerned with understanding exactly what the HCI-SE design problem is and now it might be best conceptualised.