About: Toolkits for user innovation

Toolkits for user innovation and custom design are coordinated sets of “user-friendly” design tools. They are designed to support users who may wish to develop products or services for their own use. The problem toolkits are developed to solve is that, while user designers may know their own needs better than do producers, their technical design skills may be less than those of producer-employed developers. For example, expert users of tennis rackets – or expert users of custom integrated circuits – generally know more than producers do about the function they want a product (or service) to serve. However, they are often not as good as producer engineers at actually designing the product they need.