Participatory design in community computing contexts

2004

ABSTRACT As technology becomes more embedded in our daily lives, there is a great deal of hope about the use of information technology to achieve positive community outcomes like increasing access to local information, promoting civic engagement, and creating avenues for collaboration and communication.

2007

Participatory design–the direct involvement of end-users and other stakeholders in design–has become a standard design paradigm in informatics, that is, in developing information systems, applications, infrastructures, and associated work practices. Community informatics, which addresses the impacts and utilisation of information technology to facilitate community life, is a challenging, but important domain for further developing participatory design.

2008

This paper examines the phenomenon of Community De-sign. It is a radical phenomenon in that community mem-bers collectively grow their own community information infrastructures without the intervention of professionals typically associated with such endeavors. A recently initi-ated comparative study draws on ongoing, longitudinal research engagements with a small number of communities and has identified a set of characteristics that apply across these communities that undertake Community Design. We present the characteristics grouped into three dimensions of community: organizational, social and technical. Finally, we draw attention to future research topics that we see as relevant to the expanding scopes of Participatory Design.

Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 1, 2020

Evidence and analysis of Community-Based Participatory Design (PD) and Co-Design programs are not abundant. Filling this gap allows for better understanding of (1) the value programs offer from a quantitative standpoint, and (2) how to formalize participation within PD. In this paper, we present evidence from a series of International Development Design Summits (IDDS), a PD-oriented program focused on low-cost technology co-design and co-production, in collaboration with local communities. The purpose is to provide opportunities for learning and practicing community-based PD in an intercultural setting. We examine data from five summits in Colombia between 2015-2018. We discuss the value of this approach across multiple groups, and how it can be understood as a measure of participation. We present evidence of participant benefits, including an exploratory analysis of self-perception using sentiment analysis. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential directions for this work. This paper contributes to further understand the value of participation (the "co") in the context of community-based PD. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interaction design; Interaction design process and methods; Participatory design.

2002

Abstract This paper describes our participatory design approach with two communities of interest. We discuss the tools and context of conversation and design we have been experimenting with within our research project. The paper presents a working idea of application patterns, as a useful concept for pursuing holistic interpretations of people's needs.

Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference on Research Papers - PDC '14, 2014

This paper engages with issues of universality and locality in the context of community-based participatory design (PD), and focuses on the challenges and opportunities associated with incorporating local views and forms of participation in the design process. The notion of 'designing for participation' is advanced as a quintessential perspective for approaches in which design practices are re-configured from a community-centric standpoint. Building on insights from PD and community development studies, as well as on empirical evidence from two community design studies, we argue that designing for participation appears to be located in a space between the designer's and local views of participation, which are at times both ambiguous and conflicting. To overcome these tensions, we argue for the importance of engaging critically and reflectively with PD in community contexts, and in this process capitalising on disciplinary dialogues that can expand the viewpoint from which PD projects are negotiated and evaluated.

Community-led design is a practice whereby people take the opportunity to engage directly and creatively in the formulation of solutions for their own environment. In community-led design, professionals, stakeholders and communities come together to develop sustainable solutions to complex design and planning problems. Such projects can include the co-creation of public spaces, communal and public services, as well as processes and tools for citizen participation. Web 2.0 technologies and social media offer new opportunities for community-led design, potentially transforming the ways in which people take part in these processes and their ability to make an impact. This paper reports insights from the use of different types of media in community-led design projects and reflects on their role and their value for those involved, as well as for their wider communities.

In this chapter, we share our design story of collaborating with community advocates working in a historically marginalized community. We focus on equitable and empowering co-design processes and creating a technology tool to represent the community leaders’ social justice activism: (1) negotiating roles to facilitate a participatory approach to design; (2) working across differences of language to develop equitable interactions; (3) using ethnographic methods to identify significant problems of practice; and (4) designing an equity-oriented intervention.

Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies - C&T '17, 2017

This workshop aims at stimulating and opening a debate around the capacity of Participatory Design (PD) and other co-design approaches to deliver outcomes and methodologies that can have an impact and value for reuse well beyond the local context in which they were originally developed. This will be achieved by stimulating the submission of position papers by researchers from the PD and beyond, which in turn will be discussed during the workshop in order to identify challenges, obstacles but also potentials for scaling up PD processes and results from the local to the global. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interaction design → Interaction design process and methods → Participatory design

2019

Participatory Design (PD) is a design approach which aims to support users to contribute as partners throughout the entire design process of a product or service intended for their use. PD researchers are interested in employing and/or developing methods and techniques that maximise users’ contributions. By accommodating specific populations, PD proved to offer unique benefits when designing technology for “fringe” groups. However, a lack of understanding of the appropriateness of existing approaches across groups and contexts presents a challenge for the PD community. This workshop will encourage discussion around this challenge. The participants will have the opportunity to exchange and reflect on their experiences with using PD with “fringe” groups. Moreover, we aim to identify, synthesise and collate PD best practices across contexts and participant groups.