Interviews with extreme and lead users

The knowledge is in the action and we know more than we can say.

The concept of Lead users has been particularly developed by MIT professor Eric von Hippel.

They are users whose present strong needs will become general in a marketplace months or years in the future. As lead users are familiar with conditions that lie in the future for most others, they can serve as a need forecasting laboratory for marketing research. Moreover, since lead users often attempt to fill the need they experience, they can provide new product concept and design data as well.

Designing for extreme characters is a technique that takes the opposite approach (which has been developed by Djajadiningrat, Gaver and Frens). Instead of designing for characters that are emotionally shallow, we design for characters that have exaggerated emotional attitudes.

By taking characters that are extremes, character traits can be exposed which, though common, remain hidden because they are antisocial or in conflict with a person’s status.