Participation as a matter of concern in participatory design

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2016

The paper explores what exactly it is that users participate in when being involved in participatory design (PD), relating this discussion to the CSCW perspective on collaborative design work. We argue that a focus on decision-making in design is necessary for understanding participation in design. Referring to Schön we see design as involving creating choices, selecting among them, concretizing choices and evaluating the choices. We discuss how these kinds of activities have played out in four PD projects that we have participated in. Furthermore, we show that the decisions are interlinked, and discuss the notion of decision linkages. We emphasize the design result as the most important part of PD. Finally, participation is discussed as the sharing of power, asking what the perspective of power and decision-making adds to the understanding of design practices.

Interactions, 2018

We recently edited a special issue of the ACM ToCHI journal on Re-Imagining Participatory Design (Bannon et al. 2018a) and as a result of this process, and the earlier work leading up to it, we have had many interesting discussions concerning Participatory Design (PD) and where it stands today. We refer the reader to the ToCHI special issue for details of the various contributions, but present here some further discussion of the themes that emerged as we ourselves discussed this topic of reimagining PD. The history of the field, and the ongoing debates about the general concept of "participation," have been discussed elsewhere (Simonsen and Robertson 2012, Vines et al. 2013, etc.). We have also been inspired by material in the CoDesign journal special issue on "Unfolding Participation over Time in the

Design Studies

Participatory Design, 2004

As computer technologies start to permeate the everyday activities of a continuously growing population, social and technical as well as political and legal issues will surface. Participatory design is asked to take a more critical view of participation, design, technology, and the arenas in which the network of actors and artifacts dialectically construct the social orders. This paper has a

CoDesign, 2017

This special issue on participatory design in an era of participation presents emerging topics and discussions from the thirteenth Participatory Design Conference (PDC), held at Aarhus University in August 2016. The PDC 2016 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Participatory Design conference series, which began in 1990 with the first biannual conference in Seattle. Since then, the PDC conferences have continued to bring together a multidisciplinary, international community of researchers and practitioners around issues of cooperative design. The theme for the 2016 PDC conference was 'Participatory Design in an Era of Participation'. Critical and constructive discussions were invited on the values, characteristics, politics and future practices of participatory design in an era in which participation has now become per

Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 1998

We characterize Participatory Design (PD) as a maturing area of research and as an evolving practice among design professionals. Although PD has been applied outside of technology design, here we focus on PD in relation to the introduction of computer-based systems at work. We discuss three main issues addressed by PD researchers; the politics of design; the nature of participation; and method, tools and techniques for participation. We also report on the conditions for the transfer of “PD results” to workers, user groups, and design professionals that have characterized PD over time and across geopolitical terrains. The topic of the sustainability of PD within an organizational context is also considered. The article concludes with a discussion of common issues explored within PD and CSCW and frames directions for a continuing dialogue between researchers and practitioners from the two fields. The article draws on a review of PD and CSCW literatures as well as on our own research and practical experiences.

CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, 2018

Participatory design (PD) research has historically strongly focused on the reporting of design events (e.g. workshops and prototyping activities with participants), where issues such as ‘involving users’, including the users’ point of view, and participation as a matter of mutual learning have been in the foreground. The need to further problematise and critically examine participation is nonetheless apparent. This special issue aims to shed light on participation as it unfolds over time during, between and beyond participatory events such as these. Here, we build an overview of existing directions taken by researchers to address the unfolding of participation in IT design over time. We do this by examining existing PD literature and the four contributions to this special issue. We identify two common temporalities in PD, the future-oriented and the project-based, and propose five lenses that may aid researchers in exploring and understanding the temporal dimensions of participatio...

2012

This article is a call to describe Participatory Design (PD) projects in the making, i.e. to show how the heterogeneous elements in the field are gradually organised in a participatory manner as the projects progress. It is based on two arguments. The first is a negative argument. Very often, PD projects are not described in the making. As a result, the landmarks to be used to evaluate them remain unclear or invisible. The second argument is of a more positive nature. The articles that do describe projects in the making enable landmarks to be defined that can be effectively used to evaluate PD projects. The notion of emerging groups is one of these landmarks.