Conducting workshops in a busy clinical environment

In this paper we describe a certain way of using participatory design workshops as an infrastructuring activity to accommodate users in a busy clinical environment. The problem in these settings is that the staffs seldom have time spans during their working hours that allows for participating in traditional workshop activities. However such an amount of time is often necessary to allow the participants to get into the creative activity as it is often different from the kind of work they usually engage in (Bødker, Kensing, & Simonsen, 2009). In an effort to bridge this gap we suggest a way of dividing the workshop activity into shorter workshop "sprints" with a small number of participants for each sprint. The repetition of workshop sprints is done iteratively in the sense that every output of a sprint is transferred to the next sprint as a collective accumulative memory.