“Designing in the wild”

“Unlike Donald Norman — who argues that the designer should be a dictator — participatory designer see themselves as facilitator who attempt to empower users in making their own decisions” (Spinuzzi 164)

Spinuzzi in The Methodology of Participatory Design argues that inclusion of users in the process of design and development in participatory design method can lead to better understanding of current system, empowerment of users, and thus creating more effect solutions. As I read through the papers this week, although many points of participatory design method resonated with me, going forward with the final IxD Studio project, I would be selective of the views presented in the papers.

I think some limitations of participatory design should be acknowledged before taking the methodology and applying it directly on to the design process. Although the idea of empowering users through co-creative process is noble, I think there are times when designers need to step in and provide new perspective to make a decision, and make radical changes rather than a refinement of previous issue. As Spinuzzi recognizes in his paper as limitations of the methodology, it can be “evolution, not revolution” (Spinuzzi 168).

In addition, even though Jeff Johnson states that “it is unlikely that the system will make adequate use of the users’ skills and talents or provide good support for their tasks [unless representative users are among the designers]” (Johnson et al. 141), it can be dangerous to have a researcher/designer as an integral part of the group because of the social dynamics within a group — bias, power relationship, and social. By having a researcher as a part of the user group, people might not give honest reviews and feedback because they know who the researcher is and don’t want to offend that person. Moreover, it could be hard for researchers to keep the subjective view. As Rose Johnson says “a participating researcher uses a lot of their mental and physical energy in participating — they cannot expect to be as aware of things around them as they might in a purely observational study” (Johnson et al. 1144)

With this in mind, I will be selective and apply only parts of participatory design as a methodology to pursue final IxD studio project.

How would you approach a project using participatory design methods?

For final IxD Studio project, our team is looking at how people create meaningful relationship with a ‘place’ and how it affects their relationship with family, friends, and self.

Propose what you would do / what activities you would engage

• During the exploration phase, our group decided to engage in a series of interviews, fly-on-the-wall observations, and graffiti walls in places where social interactions would occur. Before we went out to do the actual research, we asked Tracy the questions we were going to ask our interviewees to see if our questions would bring out meaningful answers that we can build our design off of. Although some questions that we asked Tracy produced underwhelming answers, we decided to keep few of them because same question can lead to dramatically different answers depending on where and who you are interviewing.

Sample questions we asked…

• Can you describe a typical week for you?
• What is favorite place to go to? What makes this place special for you?
• What are obstacles to go to this place?
• Do you go by yourself or with others? Why?
• When was the last time you had a long meaningful conversation with a stranger?
• Describe the last time you had a serendipitous experience? (“occurring or discovered by chance in a happy or beneficial way”)

What you might hope to learn

• We wanted to understand different levels of meaning/social forming through/with a place and how it provided emotional value to people.

How you would analyze your learnings

• We gained some valuable answers from people and insights that can guide us through our concept forming process. However, I want to keep in mind not to take their answers as is at face value, and think about the parts that got left ‘unsaid’ — some of them were being interviewed as a group/ do people really mean what they are saying/ are they saying something because they are aware of the fact that we are interviewing for school project / are their answers being formed by the location — and hidden insights that can only be achieved by us — designers — synthesizing beyond what is being communicated on the surface.

• Jeff Johnson, Pelle Ehn, Jonathan Grudin, Bonnie Nardi, Kari Thoresen, Lucy Suchman, “Participatory Design of Computer Systems (Panel),” inCHI ’90 Proceedings (New York: ACM Press, 1990).
• Clay Spinuzzi, “The methodology of participatory design,” Technical Communication 52(2): 163–174.
• Rose Johnson, Yvonne Rogers, Janet van der Linden, Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, “Being in the thick of in-the-wild studies: the challenges and insights of researcher participation,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’12) (New York: ACM Press, 2012): 1135–1144.
• Joanna Saad-Sulonen, Andrea Botero, Kari Kuutti, “A Long-Term Strategy for Designing (in) the Wild: Lessons from the Urban Mediator and Traffic Planning in Helsinki,” in Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (New York: ACM Press, 2012), 166–175.