Participatory Design

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Participatory design has been slowly evolving since the 1980s from its roots in the Scandinavian trade union movement, identified as the collective resource approach, mostly due to the publication of Bjerknes, Ehn, Kyng, 1987 in the United States. The scope of participatory design has enlarged beyond merely institutional capital/labour conflicts to wider issues of user empowerment in the face of growing technocratic control. The essential element is to involve the people a system affects in the decision making process of that system's design.

Participatory design has the following characteristics Clement, van den Besselaar, 1993:

  • Access to relevant information
  • independent voice in decision-making
  • user-controlled development resources
  • appropriate development methods
  • organizational/technical flexibility
  • active involvement of users
  • increased learning and communications

It also has several pitfalls. Local organizational and historical context can defeat a the participatory designer's planned scope or sequence of activities (Grudin, 1993; Suchman, 1988; Hales, 1995). Political forces may overwhelm a participatory design project unless its goals can be aligned with the prevailing winds Bannon, 1995; Gärtner, Wagner, 1994 Finally, designers/developers may

Ultimately, a participatory design project hinges on how much influence the participants can or are willing to secure Barki, Hartwick, 1994.

References

as BibTeX

Bannon, 1995
Bannon, L. (1995). The politics of design: Representing work. Communications of the ACM, 38(5), 33-44.
Barki, Hartwick, 1994
Barki, H., & Hartwick, J. (1994). User participation, conflict, and conflict resolution: The mediation roles of influence. Information Systems Research, 5(4), 422-438.
Bjerknes, Ehn, Kyng, 1987
Bjerknes, G., Ehn, P., & Kyng, M. (Eds.) (1987). Computers and Democracy - A Scandinavian Challenge. Aldershot, England: Avebury.
Bowers, Pycock, 1994
Bowers, J., & Pycock, J. (1994). Talking through design: Requirements and resistance in cooperative prototyping. In Proceedings of CHI'94 (pp. 299-305).
Clement, van den Besselaar, 1993
Clement, A., & van den Besselaar, P. (1993). A retrospective look at PD projects. Communications of the ACM, 36(4), 29-37. Available from http://www.swi.psy.uva.nl/usr/peter/publications/1993cacm.pdf.
Epstein, Yakura, 1992
Epstein, M., & Yakura, E. (1992, November). Managing the stresses of participatory design. In M. Muller, S. Kuhn, & J. Meskill (Eds.), Proceedings of PDC'92 (pp. 103-104).
Gärtner, Wagner, 1994
Gärtner, J., & Wagner, I. (1994, October 27-28). Systems as intermediaries: Political frameworks of design and participation. In R. Trigg, S. Anderson, & E. Dykstra-Erickson (Eds.), PDC'94: Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference (pp. 37-46).
Grudin, 1993
Grudin, J. (1993). Obstacles to participatory design in large product development organizations. In D. Schuler, & A. Namioka (Eds.), Participatory Design: Perspectives on Systems Design (pp. 99-119). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hales, 1995
Hales, M. (1995). Working with contexts, powers and stakeholders in configuring standard software. In Proceedings of Computers in Context: Joining Forces in Design (Aug (pp. 113-125).
Jansson, Smith, 1991
Jansson, D., & Smith, S. (1991). Design fixation. Design studies, 12(1), 3-11.
Suchman, 1988
Suchman, L. (1988). Designing with the User: Review of. Computers and Democracy: A Scandinavian challenge". ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 6(2), 173-183.
Wastell, 1993
Wastell, D. (1993). The social dynamics of systems development: Conflict, change and organizational politics. In S. Easterbrook (Ed.), CSCW: Cooperation or Conflict (pp. 69-91). London: Springer-Verlag.

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