Community-based Participatory Design in the Third World

2008

The paper describes how the VESEL project which involves a distributed team of technologists and users from different cultural backgrounds is attempting to manage the process of user involvement and participation. In this case the developers are distributed but linked by a number of communication technologies while the users have very few technological means of communicating with the developers.

International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, 2009

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...

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

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.

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...

Advanced Science Letters, 2017

This article presents challenges and opportunities of employing participatory design approach with underprivileged citizens of developing countries. Through our on-going community project that develops recycled craft products in the interest of obtaining extra income for the mothers of Penjaringan, Jakarta, obstacles and prospects of employing participatory design method has been identified. The method which is known to bring the whole stakeholders into the design process is now preferred when the end product is intended to respond the real needs of its users. However, for such methods to be successful, designers in charge to work with underprivileged citizens must understand that they will be working under very different conditions than when doing participatory design in an established society. There are economical (quantitative) as well as cultural (qualitative) discrepancies among plural settlers of Jakarta, where the underprivileged suffers the least access to good quality infrastructure, which in turn affecting their self-actualization, aesthetic sensibilities and workmanships. Our field study revealed that participatory design methods may be advantageous only if the designers firstly take the lead and empower those who have been hindered economically and culturally, before we can expect them to participate in the design process optimally. As long as the empowerment process is carried out, we realized that participatory design with underprivileged citizens of developing countries has a prospect to bring out outcomes of at least two types: First, products that suits participant’s existing socio-economical condition, and second, the empowered design process itself improves citizens’ workmanships valuable for their own future productivities.

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.

Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Full Papers - Volume 1, 2018

Participatory design in socioeconomic development is an invariably political activity fraught with both political as well as ethical entanglements. ICT for development (ICTD)often involved in contexts of great inequality and heteogeneity-places these in especially sharp relief. This paper draws attention to these entanglements as well as what they mean for the role and practice of designer-researchers practicing PD. We then draw upon our experiences in an active PD project to highlight approaches that serve as a partial response to these entanglements. These presents both limitations as well as orientations for our role as designer-researchers in engaging with and organising PD work in ICTD-providing a starting point for answering the question "who participates with whom in what and why?" CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Participatory design;