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Involving users is crucial to designing technology successfully, especially for vulnerable users in health and social care, yet detailed descriptions and critical reflections on the co-design process, techniques and methods are rare. This paper introduces the PERCEPT (PERrsona-CEntred Participatory Technology) approach for the co-design process and we analyse and discuss the lessons learned for each step in this process. We applied PERCEPT in a project to develop a smart home toolset that will allow a person living with early stage dementia or Parkinson's to plan, monitor and self-manage his or her life and well-being more effectively. We present a set of personas which were cocreated with people and applied throughout the project in the co-design process. The approach presented in this paper will enable researchers and designers to better engage with target user groups in co-design and point to considerations to be made at each step for vulnerable users.

Given that SmartGrids focus on the demand-side and are predicated on consumer participation, we propose an innovative user-infrastructure interface for SmartGrids, in which information visualisation for comparative feedback and new affordances for the Smart Meter are integrated within a virtual environment for a Serious Game. Moreover, in the context of a micro-Grid, we seek to encapsulate aspects of selforganisation and support the principles of enduring institutions through the same interface. We give an example to explain how some of the activities (rooms in the virtual environment) can be structured within the context of an electronic institution. In this way, we aim to use the SmartMeter to promote 'assistive awareness', not just for consumer participation, but also for other aspects of user engagement with critical infrastructure, for example as a citizen, as a stakeholder, and as a practitioner.

Personas are powerful tools for designing technology and envisioning its usage. They are widely used to imagine archetypal users around whom to orient design work. We have been exploring co-created personas as a technique to use in co-design with users who have diverse needs. Our vision was that this would broaden the demographic and liberate co-designers of their personal relationship with a health condition. This paper reports three studies where we investigated using co-created personas with people who had Parkinson's disease, dementia or aphasia. Observational data of co-design sessions were collected and analysed. Findings revealed that the co-created personas encouraged users with diverse needs to engage with co-designing. Importantly, they also aforded additional benefts including empowering users within a more accessible design process. Refecting on the outcomes from the diferent user groups, we conclude with a discussion of the potential for co-created personas to be applied more broadly.

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