How do developers and designers of a new technology make sense of
intended users? The critical groundwork for user-centred technology development
begins not by involving actual users' exposure to the technological artefact but much earlier, with designers' and developers' vision of future users. Thus, anticipating intended users is critical to technology uptake. We conceptualise the anticipation of intended users as a form of prospective sensemaking in technology development. Employing a narrative analytical approach and drawing on four key communities in the development of Grid computing, we reconstruct how each community anticipated the intended Grid user. Based on our findings, we conceptualise user anticipation in Terms of two key dimensions, namely the intended possibility to inscribe user needs into the technological artefact as well as the intended scope of the application domain. In turn, these dimensions allow us to develop an initial typology of intended user concepts that in turn might provide a key building block towards a generic typology of intended users.
From a semiotic point of view, we observe that technologies can increasingly be "authored" or "written" by their users. If we are to understand processes of user-driven innovation, we need not only to consider how the user writes the technology but also how the user is configured within and through different discourses. Our study aims at contributing to a more fine-grained concept of the user in organization studies by suggesting that the technological artefact as well as the user are simultaneously under recursive (social) construction. In supplementing typical innovation studies' retrospective research design, we ground our argument in the empirical case of a currently ongoing development of a not yet stabilized technology, Grid computing, that allows us precisely to study in vivo how different versions of users are written and negotiated in the recursive development of technology and communities of users.
