Notes on “participatory”

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Rettig’s Notes

7 min readApr 4, 2016

This is not a complete piece of writing, but rather a place for me to take notes, which I’m making public in case it helps someone else. This collection will change (though maybe not very frequently). It’s a work in progress, the cookies are still dough, standard disclaimers apply.

The topics here: participatory design, “participation with” as a social design principle, “user design” vs. “user-centered design,” taking “together” seriously in systemic work,….

The spark for starting to compile these notes was a class session at CMU. (Here’s the syllabus for the course.) The notes have already supported a few slides, which you can find on Slideshare.

Gleanings from Wikipedia entry on Participatory Design

Here’s the source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design

Here are clips. Emphasis is mine.

Definition: involve all stakeholders
Participatory design (originally co-operative design, now often co-design) is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders (e.g. employees, partners, customers, citizens, end users) in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable. Participatory design is an approach which is focused on processes and procedures of design and is not a design style. The term is used in a variety of fields e.g. software design, urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, sustainability, graphic design, planning, and even medicine as a way of creating environments that are more responsive and appropriate to their inhabitants’ and users’ cultural, emotional, spiritual and practical needs. It is one approach to placemaking.

Recent research suggests that designers create more innovative concepts and ideas when working within a co-design environment with others than they do when creating ideas on their own.[1]

Participatory design has been used in many settings and at various scales. For some, this approach has a political dimension of user empowerment and democratization. For others, it is seen as a way of abrogating design responsibility and innovation by designers.

In several Scandinavian countries, during the 1960s and 1970s, participatory design was rooted in work with trade unions; its ancestry also includes action research and sociotechnical design.

Variables [my notes, not wikipedia’s]

all stakeholders, or only the direct “users”?
throughout the process, or only during initial concept development?
as a source of input, or as full participants in the work?
go visit “them,” or work as “we, altogether”?

History

Participatory design was actually born in Scandinavia and called cooperative design. However, when the methods were presented to the US community ‘cooperation’ was a word that didn’t resonate with the strong separation between workers and managers — they weren’t supposed to discuss ways of working face-to-face. [How widespread is this attitude today? mr] Hence, ‘participatory’ was instead used as the initial Participatory Design sessions weren’t a direct cooperation between workers and managers, sitting in the same room discussing how to improve their work environment and tools, but there were separate sessions for workers and managers. Each group was participating in the process, not directly cooperating. (in historical review of Cooperative Design, at a Scandinavian conference).

1970’s

The Scandinavian projects developed an action research approach, emphasizing active co-operation between researchers and workers of the organization to help improve the latter’s work situation. While researchers got their results, the people whom they worked with were equally entitled to get something out of the project. The approach built on people’s own experiences, providing for them resources to be able to act in their current situation. The view of organizations as fundamentally harmonious — according to which conflicts in an organization are regarded as pseudo-conflicts or “problems” dissolved by good analysis and increased communication — was rejected in favor of a view of organizations recognizing fundamental “un-dissolvable” conflicts in organizations (Ehn & Sandberg, 1979).

Co-design is often used by trained designers who recognize the difficulty in properly understanding the cultural, societal, or usage scenarios encountered by their user. C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy are usually given credit for bringing co-creation/co-design to the minds of those in the business community with the 2004 publication of their book, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. They propose:

“The meaning of value and the process of value creation are rapidly shifting from a product and ﬁrm-centric view to personalized consumer experiences. Informed, networked, empowered and active consumers are increasingly co-creating value with the ﬁrm.”

Examples

Project for public spaces: Place game

[Continuing Wikipedia clips] Using a method called Place Performance Evaluation or (Place Game), groups from the community are taken on the site of proposed development, where they use their knowledge to develop design strategies, which would benefit the community. ‘’Whether the participants are schoolchildren or professionals, the exercise produces dramatic results because it relies on the expertise of people who use the place every day, or who are the potential users of the place.’’[10] This successfully engages with the ultimate idea of participatory design, where various stakeholders who will be the users of the end product, are involved in the design process as a collective.

[See these articles, harvest them:

Similar projects have had success in Melbourne, Australia particularly in relation to contested sites, where design solutions are often harder to establish. The Talbot Reserve in the suburb of St Kilda faced numerous problems of use, such as becoming a regular spot for sex workers and drug users to congregate. A Design In, which incorporated a variety of key users in the community about what they wanted for the future of the reserve allowed traditionally marginalised voices to participate in the design process. Participants described it as ‘a transforming experience as they saw the world through different eyes.’ (Press, 2003, p. 62). This is perhaps the key attribute of participatory design, a process which, allows multiple voices to be heard and involved in the design, resulting in outcomes which suit a wider range of users. As planning affects everyone it is believed that ‘those whose livelihoods, environments and lives are at stake should be involved in the decisions which affect them’ (Sarkissian and Perglut, 1986, p. 3)

In software, “user design” vs. “user-centered design”

Participatory design can be seen as a move of end-users into the world of researchers and developers, whereas empathic design can be seen as a move of researchers and developers into the world of end-users. There is a very significant differentiation between user-design and User-centered design in that there is an emancipatory theoretical foundation, and a systems theory bedrock (Ivanov, 1972, 1995), on which user-design is founded.

Indeed, user-centered design is a useful and important construct, but one that suggests that users are taken as centers in the design process, consulting with users heavily, but not allowing users to make the decisions, nor empowering users with the tools that the experts use. For example, Wikipedia content is user-designed. Users are given the necessary tools to make their own entries. Wikipedia’s underlying wiki software is based on user-centered design: while users are allowed to propose changes or have input on the design, a smaller and more specialized group decide about features and system design.