Participatory Design

Definition

"Participatory Design (PD) is an approach to the assessment, design, and development of technological and organizational systems that places a premium on the active involvement of workplace practitioners (usually potential or current users of the system) in design and decision-making processes." (http://cpsr.org/issues/pd/index.html)

Description

Francesco Zurlo et al:

"Autonomous participation within creative communities does not necessitate the guide of professional designers. On the contrary, this is a need of the participative design, where “the architectural proposals are positively biased by the designer preferences”. Rather, the designer’s skill is spent in our case to promote bottom up solutions. In this way the professional designer moves from the consent search within the participative design to facing a diffuse design as a seed of a design stimulating values.

In this framework the designer is called to reshape his/her skill in view of introducing a systemic feature in the creative communities activities, thus promoting an innovation that is both feasible and bottom up. The strategic tools that the designer will provide will reflect the capacity of: seeing, the genuine content questioned by significant instances; forecasting, on the basis of the actual scenarios future situations promising to be profitable; highlighting, suitable mainstreams and instances, showing the most convenient perspective and developing ancillary actions in terms of products, services and knowledge promoting their effectiveness and accessibility. The overall goal is to create renewed constellations of values shaping the society’s complexity.

The tools of a stimulating design must both excite the creative community members and identify the design strongholds. They are tools in progress deriving from a research-action process. This is a well assessed methodology drawn from the social sciences and adopted for instance in the Me.Design research project. The research-action promotes analysis and project opportunities within specific territorial resource contexts as well as occasions of enhancing the local knowledge rooted in places, production know how and individual skills." (http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=342)

Characteristics

"There can be no single definition of PD. However, we can formulate a few tenets shared by most PD practitioners and advocates.

• Respect the users of technology, regardless of their status in the workplace, technical know-how, or access to their organization's purse strings. View every participant in a PD project as an expert in what they do, as a stakeholder whose voice needs to be heard.

• Recognize that workers are a prime source of innovation, that design ideas arise in collaboration with participants from diverse backgrounds, and that technology is but one option in addressing emergent problems.

• View a "system" as more than a collection of software encased in hardware boxes. In PD, we see systems as networks of people, practices, and technology embedded in particular organizational contexts.

• Understand the organization and the relevant work on its own terms, in its own settings. This is why PD practitioners prefer to spend time with users in their workplaces rather than "test" them in laboratories.

• Address problems that exist and arise in the workplace, articulated by or in collaboration with the affected parties, rather than attributed from the outside.

• Find concrete ways to improve the working lives of co-participants by, for example, reducing the tedium associated with work tasks; co-designing new opportunities for exercising creativity; increasing worker control over work content, measurement and reporting; and helping workers communicate and organize across hierarchical lines within the organization and with peers elsewhere.

• Be conscious of one's own role in PD processes; try to be a "reflective practitioner."

(http://cpsr.org/issues/pd/introInfo/)

Example

The full article describes a case study of the research-action methodology mentioned above, at http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=342

Discussion

PD in gaming

T.T. Taylor:

"The notion that technology users, even seemingly unskilled ones, might be valuable participants in the construction and maintenance of systems ... Starting in the mid–1970s the participatory design (PD) tradition was involved in primarily integrating workers (often through trade unions) into the process of technology development and use in the workplace. Fundamental to much of the early work in the field was a concern for the power relationships between users, designers, and managers. PD sought to give workers a meaningful seat at the design table, enlisting them and their everyday practices into the very heart of the technologies they would use. Even more radically, the very notion that particular systems were inevitable was something also challenged, thus problematizing any determinist orientation (Ehn, 1988).

Over the years PD has morphed and adapted to various national contexts and socio–economic changes such that we might consider the weak and strong formulations of the orientation. Though some would dispute whether the name PD can be attached to it, for the purposes of this piece I will suggest, drawing on the work of Finn Kensing and Jeanette Blomberg (1998), two models. There is a weak form of the approach in which user–participants give designers access to their skills and experiences, but “have little or no control over the design process or its outcome.” Participation is constrained to “those aspects of the project where their input is viewed as valuable” but they cannot initiate spheres of intervention on their own and do not contribute to technology decisions (and for the purposes of this argument, game mechanics or structure). On the other hand, the strong version of PD is one in which users participate “not only because their skills and experience are considered valuable, but also because their interests in the design outcome are acknowledged and supported.” Participation by users is considered of core value to the success of the project and they are involved not only in the “user experience” side of things, but analysis, design, evaluation and selection of technology, and organizational implementation. Jonas Löwgren and Erik Stolterman (2004) note the multidirectionality of the method, stating that, “Participatory design is a process of mutual learning, where designers and users learn from and about each other. Truly participatory design requires a shared social and cultural background and a shared language. Hence, participatory design is not only a question of users participating in design, but also a question of designers participating in use.” While game designers are typically avid players themselves, I think we might also see this as a call for their participation in the forms everyday non–designer users engage with the space." (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/special11_9/taylor/index.html)

More Information

• CPSR annual PD conferences via http://cpsr.org/issues/pd/index.html

• Asaro, P. M. 2000. Transforming society by transforming technology: the science and politics of participatory design. Accounting Management and Information Technologies, 10, 257–290.