Form Follows Practice -- Who Designs? Technological Mediation in Design Participation -- User's Continuity in Design Continuous Innovation -- Towards User Involvement in Envisioning Practices. Opening the Use of the Future -- Critical Design: a Delicate Balance between the Thrill of the Uncanny and the Interrogation of the Unknown -- Digital Objects Topologies: Transitions between Utility, Form and Intent -- Design Ethnography? Towards a Designerly Approach to Field Research -- (Mis)Behavioral Objects: Empowerment of Users vs Empowerment of Objects -- Open Sourcing Wearables: the Impact of Open Technologies and User Engagement in the Design of Body-Borne Interactive Products -- Trialogical Learning: a New Framework for Learning Through the Creative Relationship between Emerging Technologies and Multiple Participants -- Open Meta-Design: Tools for Designing Collaborative Processes -- Co-Design to Empower Cultural Heritage Professionals as Technology Designers: the meSch project -- User Empowerment and the I-Doc Model User -- "Nothing Makes Sense": New Aesthetics of Experiences in Self-Organizing Services -- A Manifesto for Epistemological Empowerment in Chronic Disease Self Care.

At the crossroads of various disciplines, this collective work examines the possibility of a new end-user "engagement" in ongoing digital/technological products and services development. It provides an overview of recent research specifically focused on the user's democratic participation and empowerment. It also enables readers to better identify the main opportunities of participatory design, a concept which encourages the blurring of the role between user and designer. This allows people to escape their status as "end-user" and to elevate themselves to the level of creator. This book explores new avenues for rethinking the processes and practices of corporate innovation in order to cope with current socio-economic and technological changes. In so doing, it aims to help companies renew industrial models that allow them to design and produce new ranges of technological products and services by giving the user an active role in the development process, far beyond the basic role of consumer. Intended for designers, design researchers and scientists interested in innovation and technology management, this book also provides a valuable resource for professionals involved in technology-based innovation processes.