End user participation in design is widely believed to benefit system development. In
1992, when the U.S. National Research Council advocated broadening research in
computer science, it strongly recommended collaborative projects in which the user/
application discipline was an equal partner with computer science. This article exam
ines the incentives and costs in user-designer relationships and argues that the costs to
users are unexpected and often not assumable and that there are asymmetries inherent in
the user-designer relationship that destabilize the collaboration. The article draws on a
case study of Sequoia 2000, a multimillion dollar collaboration between computerscien
tists and global change researchers.
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