Room for improvement: Space as a change agent in generating interaction and new relations

This paper develops the notion of a project war room as an innovation practice in companies. We argue that the consistent use of a project war room, in which customer and user research serves as a background for design work, improve the quality
of product innovation. We describe our experiences from a project with four Danish medium-sized manufacturing companies aiming to
become more competitive in the European export market. In the project, one challenge was how to convey results from customer interviews and user studies from the researcher team (which in all instances included a company manager) to the development team in each company. We chose to collaboratively build a ‘war room’ in each of the companies to make sense of research materials and establish design principles for products that would better align with customer needs.