Participatory Design
For the third project, my group is exploring the meaning of meditation, and practical applications of. I think we are far to in the early stages to define what exactly our product/ project is. We are doing ethnographic research on meditation and how people deal with their stress, to come to a conclusion and direction of what we should be working on.
Participatory design to me is when you bring in the users and stakeholders to design in a team. I think that having participatory design or co-design sessions too early in the process could potentially be disruptive to the design process. I think participatory design could potentially have a place once our team has a defined direction. But even then, I feel like getting people to play with our object in a one on one session may be more productive.
I can understand the alignment co-design could bring to the table, but I feel like research and internal direction are two different things. I am a strong believer that you should work with the user to understand their needs, and check back often to test current iterations of the product with the user to make sure you are on the right track. Design with the user often happens within these sessions. Its just different if you have a VP, a user and a designer all trying to work on the same thing at once. My experience has been that the VP doesn’t have the time, and often leads the conversation to what they think the product should be. The user is influenced by their leading questions and the project becomes a muck.
Though saying that, it is powerful for the vp to hear untainted information directly from the users mouth, which only can happen if they can step back and come at the problem as equals, which in my experience hasn’t happened for me.
To me, and maybe I am wrong in my view, it is usually better when it is just the user and the designer, and the designer can parse the information and run the relevant learnings up the chain.
But for the IxD studio final project, I think it would be really great if we could bring in users to get their immediate thoughts over the course of a brainstorm. And since our project has no stakeholders other then the other people on my team, it could work pretty well.
I would say that we would take users through the design process, if we brought them in earlier, our users would be people who are pretty stressed and have only just discovered meditation. We would probably bring them through a 356 exercise, 3 drawings, five times for 6 people.
have them be part of the review process, and explain which ones would get at our direction.
If we bring them in later in the process when we know the direction and application of we would do design exercises that validate the direction while hopefully make the idea richer. We could do this with self hardening clay, if it is a wearable, where we get users to shape the clay into something they would wear/use. While doing this we could be interviewing them about the topic and get their opinions on direction/usefulness. Hopefully when we bring them in we had already contacted them before to know their needs/thoughts on/habits.
To me participatory design is generating ideas that are relevant and to gain alignment within the team to then go forward. I don’t know if I would consider participatory design- testing. If we have our wearable and give it to users to wear, to then see how they are interacting with it, is that participatory design? We would be learning from their actions and comments, but it is more in a reaction to something already designed, rather then creating something to be designed. But I guess thats what the users would be doing if we brought them in at earlier stages, reacting to the information we give them, and the information they give us would help us with the next iteration of the design.
