The relationship between users and companies

USERS - COMPANY divide
One of the key issues that user-centered research and design aim to solve is the lack of communication and feedback between the users (of products/services) and the companies (who create those products/services). Even nowadays it is typical for a company to create new products, based on a new/existing technology, without a real understanding of who will actually use the product and if it is actually useful. Most of the time there are already existing tools/behaviors with which users use in their daily life, and the use of the new product would either replace the existing tools or change the way of the flow of the activity (i.e. behavior). So question is not really about whether the new product works per se, but rather, is it better than the existing tool (in the sense that the user prefers it), or worth learning the new way of the activity.

Traditionally technology companies have been content in just creating new products and "letting the market" create the understanding of what the product is actually useful for. The text messaging (SMS) in mobile phones is an example of this approach. This is however a wasteful process - there are no guarantees that any single product will have success in the market, it's quite darwinian approach, really.

USER-CENTRED, PARTICIPATORY and DIY (do it yourself)
In an effort to lessen the risk of failure in the market, companies have started to embrace the usability and user-centred approaches. These approaches help the companies to have some guarantees and checks that the new products/services actually are usable and meaningful to the users (and consequently more successful in the market). These approaches advocate companies to hire professional researchers and designers who contact actual or potential users of the product-in-development and try to understand and empathize the users in order to have the knowledge to create more meaningful and usable products. This could be described as an approach where companies reach out for the users.

Another parallel is the participatory approach, where companies invite users to participate in development and design of the products. The company allows the users to participate into its own processes. Typically it is the company, however, that specifies the context of development and chooses which proposals will be further developed.

Third parallel is the DIY approach, where users simply create the products and services by themselves, without direct involvement of the companies. The suitability and quality of the product is directly dependent on the skills and knowledge of the user who creates.

OPENSOURCE
During the last twenty years, open source movement has emerged as a new approach for companies and users to approach the development and design of the products. What makes it different is the emphasis in networked collaboration and the blurring of the distiction between the users and creators. In open source, a single company is not necessarily controlling the development of the product, but a trusted individual or group of individuals. Those individuals may be employed by different companies, or they may be working for free. The trusted individuals are implicitly able to maintain their leadership as long as they are sensitive to the desires and needs of the users of the products and other developers. A balance has to be struck between the desires of different participants and the trusted individuals are essentially evaluated on their ability to keep a good balance.