Action Steps Sprint workshop at DRS2026

At DRS2026, the Design Research Society conference in Edinburgh, I led the hands-on Explorations session “Action Steps Sprint: Translating user scenarios into engineering specifications with interdisciplinary teams”, organized with Daehun Lee and Prof. KwanMyung Kim.

In 90 minutes, three teams of designers, engineers and researchers worked from the same night-time elder-care scenario, in which an older man wakes with heart palpitations, takes his medication, goes to the bathroom and back, and rests before returning to sleep, supported by a companion robot. Using a shared workbook, each team identified the scenario elements, paired user and product actions into interaction sequences, wrote functional requirements in a fixed form (“the product shall … in order to … under …”), chose candidate components and started on specification targets.

The completed workbooks show where translation needs judgment. Participants added transitions and exception cases that the scenario had left out, questioned starting from a predetermined robot concept, and found it hard to reach quantitative targets within the session. Based on these observations, we proposed refinements to the method, such as distinguishing explicit from inferred actions and showing how mature each specification is.