The purpose of scenarios is to stimulate thinking about possible occurrences, assumptions relating these occurrences, possible opportunities and risks, and courses of action. For example, HCI researchers use scenarios to enhance user-designer communications and managers use scenarios to explore alternative futures and the impact of systems. Software engineers see scenarios as a promising means to discover user needs that are not obvious in analysis situations, to better describe the use of system in work processes, and to systematically explore normal-case and exceptional behavior of a system and its environment. Researchers from other disciplines have used scenario analysis for a long time. Economists have successfully used scenarios for long-range planning.
Management scientists use scenarios for strategic decision-making.
Policy makers use scenarios to weigh the possible consequences of their actions. In an interdisciplinary perspective, scenarios are used to examine the interplay among economic, social, and technological issues. A second issue of interest is the management of scenarios as complex artifacts throughout the planning and systems lifecycle. It comprised plenary sessions as well as subgroup discussions, as shown on the Agenda on the next pages. This is followed by short abstracts of presentations written by participants.