Cross-Cultural Participatory Design in the Developing World

International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, 2009

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

Designers face a number of challenges in terms of how to design interactive systems with indigenous groups. Every layer of development faces obstacles from designing localized interfaces to facilitating prototype evaluations in the wild. This article argues for the importance of continuous user involvement and participatory design. This is highlighted through explaining ongoing research in the creation of a 3D visualization knowledge management system to support preservation of indigenous knowledge (IK) in Africa. Through the sharing of experiences from the field I underpin the importance of acknowledging users' expertise and knowledge about the design context. Through presentation of a selection of these challenges in localizing systems development I wish to raise awareness of an required sensitivity to cultural differences in IT.

1996

This paper argues that participatory design (PO) approaches are of particular importance in the third world. Local adaptation of information systems, empowerment and the creation of local commitment and ownership through a participative process are issues of vital importance in third world computing. These are all central issues in a participatory design tradition. The participatory design tradition typically addresses the workplace while a third world environment typically consists of economically deprived communities where the majority might be without formal employment. This paper discusses how the participatory design tradition can be expanded in order to be adapted to third world conditions. In this context it is suggested that the community should become both a participant and an area of focus.

2019

According to the principles of participatory design, a genuine democratic process requires effective participation of all affected people in the design process; this must include affected disabled users. However, user participation entails complex problems, which are aggravated by conditions of illiteracy and/or aging. This article presents the concept of Universal Participatory Design, a design philosophy and practice that aims to be inclusive during the design process, and which has a positive result for all. We first conducted a review of the literature to understand the limits of the relationships between participatory design and universal design. This paper then addresses some of the challenges to achieve Universal Participatory Design (UPD) by juxtaposing deficits observed in the literature with issues we experienced during two research projects. We discuss the key components of Participatory Design and its relationship to UPD, and establish a research agenda that aims to conc...

Conference Proceedings of the Academy for Design Innovation Management, 2019

Participatory design is a widely recognised approach in Design for Development projects. It supports collaborative, community-based practices and it empowers users to take ownership. Despite the importance of participatory design in solving global challenges, the majority of research has focused its application in the Global North. Recently, some studies have explored participatory design methods in more low-resource settings. Still there is a gap between the existence of these methods, and designers being able to use them successfully because of the complex realities they face in low-resource settings. Existing knowledge is fragmented and there is a lack of best practice guidance for practitioners using participatory design in low-resource settings. We address this problem by reporting the experiences of Simprints, a technology company based in the UK, providing biometric identification solutions in the Global South. Our study reveals key recommendations for participatory design in...

Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Participatory Design (PD) must increasingly be able to serve various global contexts. Overall, a fundamental need has been identified in the PD community to raise previously unheard global voices in design and development work, and to bring various underrepresented stakeholders together. On the other hand, the rapid adoption of various synchronous and asynchronous communication methods through collaborative online tools offers opportunities for more dispersed and more diverse PD research teams, settings and processes. This raises new possibilities for bridging global distances and bringing various stakeholders together for the purposes of conducting multicultural, multi-site PD. Importantly, while there exists extensive research literatures both on PD, on remote ethnography and on Computer-Supported Collaborative Work, we posit that these literatures have not been brought together; nor have the practices and methodologies of these communities been sufficiently jointly explored to support the goals of multisite, multicultural PD. In this workshop, we strive to bridge this gap in knowledge through exploring the opportunities of conducting hybrid multisite Participatory Design (HMPD) research through synchronous and asynchronous present-telepresent participatory methods, and to share issues, challenges, opportunities, methods and empirical examples pertaining to this as a goal. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interaction design; Interaction design process and methods; Participatory design.

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

In this paper we present our experience in building a socio-technical infrastructure for supporting social innovation in Information Technology. We start by describing a case study on the design and use of a smartphone application for the canteen services of a local university; based on this, we propose what we call the hourglass approach to support participatory design and development in Information Technology. The hourglass is defined by the intersection of two co-evolving dimensions of infrastructuring: the social and the technical ones. Different subsets of the community, characterized by the increasing involvement of self-selected volunteers, position themselves along the two axes and have different roles in the design and use of the generated artefact. We conclude by discussing how this approach can help addressing some of the current challenges (i.e. scale, milieu and responsibilities) of social innovation in Information Technology.