Supporting Empathetic Boundary Spanning in Participatory Workshops with Scenarios and Personas

This paper examines the employment of design methods in combination with SimLab™ process simulation method in the context of developing IT-based support and processes for the fuzzy-front end innovation in a real-world organizational setting. The authors bring together theories and concepts from the fields of design studies and knowledge management across boundaries. They use these theories, rooted in the practice-based perspective, as analytical lenses in the case study. Acting at the interface of different knowledge domains, the authors look into the role of empathy-laden boundary objects as potential enablers of boundary spanning. The authors present empirically grounded findings from an ongoing research project with an emphasis on the methods and techniques employed. Their empirical data consists of recorded and transcribed group discussions from a participatory workshop, and individual thematic interviews have been used as raw material for constructing the process map, personas and scenarios (the boundary objects). The data was analyzed applying qualitative content analysis with an interpretative approach. Their findings are explored more closely in the article.