Co-designing mood boards: creating dialogue with people

A growing number of researchers and designers have understood the importance of involving users in the creation of future designs. As a result, several authors have introduced 'design labs', discussing their benefits. However, these studies fail to give a detailed account of how they support co-creation between the research (or development) team and users. In this paper we introduce 'dialogue-labs' to support the co-design of novel interactions for a specific task (i.e. ways of creating and communicating mood boards), and for a specific user group (i.e. industrial designers). We discuss how different types of locations, tasks, and materials allowed us to spark dialogue between researchers and participants. We present a comparison of the materials used and the quality of the ideas that emerged during the sessions that can help researchers and designers create dialogue with people.