Participatory Design

Participatory Design

Daniel Steinberg, Drexel University,
Darryl Gardner, Drexel University,
Brian Smith, Drexel University,

Abstract: Participatory Design (PD) is an approach that highly values actively involving all stakeholders in the design process to ensure that the product designed meets their needs and is usable by all. The methodology is used to create environments that are more responsive and appropriate to their users' cultural, emotional, spiritual and practical needs. Participatory design is focused on processes and procedures of design and sometimes has a political dimension of user empowerment and democratization. The main critique against it is that it may absolve the designers of responsibility for contentious decisions and stifle any real innovation if not practiced appropriately.

Introduction

Participatory design revolves around actively involving all stakeholders in the design process to ensure that the system or product meets their needs and is usable by all parties. The methodology is used to create environments that are more responsive and appropriate to their users' cultural, emotional, spiritual and practical needs. PD is “extraordinarily diverse, drawing on fields such as user-centered design, graphic design, software engineering, architecture, public policy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, labor studies, communication studies, and political science.” (Muller 1)

Since the late 1990s, computers have increasingly become more integral parts of people’s lives. Initially used primarily for work in the workplace, they are now also commonplace in homes and schools. While work typically refers to that which is done in a business setting, the far reach of computers demands that we expand the definition of work to include school and the home as well. That is, when we discuss using PD to evaluate work, this should be taken more broadly to refer to the relationship between users and technology.

As practitioners of participatory design have been advocating for some time, many others are beginning to realize that the skills and experiences of users need to be present in the design of computer systems and the work that they support. This is critical as it will help ensure a better fit between technology and the ideal ways in which people wish to perform their work. As designers, we must be concerned “. . . with a more human, creative, and effective relationship between those involved in technology’s design and its use, and in that way between technology and the human activities that provide technological systems with their reason for being.” (Kensing and Blomberg 167)

Participatory Design has, as expected, a healthy history with CSCW systems, however the concept may be applied to any environment where multiple users are designing toward a common goal. Sources contained within generally do apply to IT systems at-large, with occasional recognition of the fact that the ideas and processes behind PD have broad applicability in the real world.

The paper will examine a wide array of sources to analyze the advantages that communal, cooperative design provides while fully exploring the aforementioned main critique of the approach. The effects of abrogating design responsibilities without proper process may yield negative results in such that the main focus then becomes mitigating the gamble on relying on the user base for design concerns. While the paper examines the approach in general - it’s broad applicability, strengths and weaknesses - a subsequent exploration is conducted on the use of PD in the public sector as well as the application of its methodologies and principles in the fields of e-Learning and web 2.0.

Overview, Methods, and Approaches
Involving Users in System Design

There are three major ways to involve users in the design process: via collected metrics, empirically, and through true participation. The simplest to administer and analyze, and the method most commonly used when a design team is short on budget and time, is observation through metrics. Take web design for example - once a site has been connected with an analytics service, the designers can view very specific metrics that range from time spent on a page to which pages receive the most traffic. Using this data, the team can take the most frequented pages and resources, and make it even quicker to access them. There are certainly aspects of users’ intentions that analysts can infer from this data, though it isn’t exactly a science and the data is often without much context.

Next, and quite popular earlier in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is empirical design (ED), in which designers make decisions by studying users and the situations where the software will be used. ED relies quite heavily on user interviews and observation however the users are treated more like guinea pigs than actual partners or collaborators. This method typically offers more context than straight metrics, however there is much richer data out there still.

Participatory design sets itself far apart from the aforementioned user inclusion methods in that it is extremely context-based and views the user as an integral part of the design team. Users aren’t included in the team by manager edict, rather because they are so engaged by the requirements and design techniques in use. Users assist from the very beginning, starting with the prototype of the user interface, all the way though launch and follow-up feedback. (Cohn 152)

Making Emotional Connections

Although there are many methods of system design in general, most people will agree that the desired end result is an emotional connection between a person and the product or application. To increase the likelihood of making such a connection, more information is needed at the front end of the design process than most methods typically prescribe. The design team must tap into the front line workers to begin to understand what the users want and how they want to feel. Designers need to gain access to the thought processes and imaginations of target users and if they’re truly successful, the team will quickly begin to see the future of the design process through the eyes of the people who will be using the product or service. The tricky part here is that people often don’t explicitly and consciously know what they want. We, as designers, cannot glean this information from interviews or observed sessions of work. This information is can only be extracted by actively involving users in the process from start to finish. (Gage and Kolari 2002)

The Third Space

Muller (2009) speaks to an important concept involving hybrid experiences - “practices that take place neither in the workers’ domain, nor in the software professionals’ domain, but in an ‘in-between’ region that shares attributes of both the workers’ space and the software professionals’ space.” Within the hybrid space, the old assumptions of both parties are open to questioning, challenges, reinterpretation and even refutation and it is because of this unpredictable and unfamiliar environment that enhanced knowledge exchange is possible. “These dialogues across differences and – more importantly – within differences are stronger when engaged in by groups, emphasizing not only a shift from assumptions to reflections, but also from individuals to collectives.” (Muller 4)

Each audience (workers and designers) have their own worlds, their own knowledge and their own practices. The individuals within each realm are comfortable in what they know and it is really this hybrid space that allows for such a rich exchange of knowledge. Individuals or groups can take a step back from what they “know” to be true and question its validity - ultimately strengthening some of their own convictions, understanding the other side on a deeper level, and learning more about what they didn’t know that they didn’t really know.
Approaches
Socio-Technical Approach

The socio-technical approach aims for social and technical systems to be optimized within a specific organization in ways that a beneficial for the workers. The approach is specific to the local system; local conflicts and obstructions are addressed by local structural change. Even though proponents have acknowledged that conflict, struggle, and power at levels higher than the local organization can in fact be relevant, the approach stresses keeping the scope to the immediately local level. (Torpel, Voss, Hartswood, and Procter 16) The approach generally assumes societal harmony which may be too rosy an approach for a realist.

Collective Resource Approach

Unlike the socio-technical approach, the collective resource approach assumes inherent and pervasive conflict, struggle and unequal power relations. Those utilizing it take a very partisan approach to developing technology, most often favoring and supporting the weakest parties involved, usually the workers. “In this view, the workers’ position should be strengthened to enable them to push their agendas forward against exploitative capital endowed with far greater power and resources.” (Torpel, Voss, Hartswood, and Procter 17) Although this has a very union/worker/management slant, it is easily brought into the more typical information workplace by viewing the priorities and decisions of managers and employees as inherently being in conflict. While the socio-technical approach may not be the best for realists, the collective resource approach perhaps swings too far to the other side of the spectrum.

MUST

One of the major concerns with PD is how to implement it in a practical way within modern day work environments. Being able to realize the benefits of the practices while not creating bottlenecks or unnecessary stoppages in normal work processes is critical for an ideal experience. MUST (a Danish acronym for theories and methods for design activities) is concerned with making PD relevant and practically feasible within modern companies. “ In particular, it empha- sises the importance of the wider organisational context in which PD tends to take place, as well as the fact that most systems development today does not simply take place in-house but involves external players and market relationships.” (Torpel, Voss, Hartswood, and Procter 19) In contrast to other approaches, MUST does not take sides but instead seeks to include the interests of both management and workers.

Corporate Research and Development

Participatory design in corporate research and development differs from the other approaches in that they deal with specific target settings, where participants must accept the new technologies, as opposed to open consumer markets where adoption is discretionary. Thus, the emphasis in this approach revolves around establishing ways to bring together “context of use” and “design knowledge”, while enabling consumers and inspiring innovation. “Usually, the motivation behind these efforts is a practical one stemming from the experience that usability issues are often addressed too late in the development life- cycle to have real impact and that laboratory-based approaches are found to be in- adequate to reflect the complexities of real-world use situations.” (Torpel, Voss, Hartswood, and Procter 19)

Semiotic Conference

There are two basic perspectives to systems design - one that focuses on the product itself and the second that looks closely at the human work processes that the system is supposed to support. Semiotic Conference (SC) is proposed by Bonacin and Baranuaskas (2003) as a “way to explore process-oriented issues related to the social context of the workplace and its connections with aspects of the product being designed.” The approach comes from a combination of PD and Organizational Semiotics, the study of organization using the concepts and methods of Semiotics (the study of signs or symbols and their use or interpretation). Two methods are employed during SC, Semantic Analysis (SA) and Norm Analysis (NA). SA seeks to describe an organization by focusing on the agents and their pattern of behaviors. NA describes the relationships between an intentional use of signs and the resulting behavior in a social context. (Bonacin and Baranuaskas 39)

Applications in Engineering and Computer Science

Adapting Virtual Reality for the Participatory Design of Work Environments

In the 1990s, Participatory Design methodology that utilized visualization and active involvement was proven to be effective in several workplace design cases. Other studies have shown that 3D computer aided visualization has been an effective communication tool for the design of workplace environments and for visualizing work-flow. Recent studies have sought to combine these methods by adapting PC-based virtual reality tools for the participatory design of workplace environments.

This research has lead to the development of Envisionment Workshops, in which the workers work with designers by using full-scale modeling and democratic meetings to design work environments. The results of these case studies suggest that PC-based virtual reality tools can be built and used successfully with small groups of users and designers. However, these tools have been proven to be less effective with larger groups because of the difficulty in sharing vitual reality tools simultaneously with a large number of people.

Eucalyptus Project Enables Fully Participatory Multi-site Design

Limitations in network bandwidth have limited the effectiveness of participatory design in systems where users and designers are not on the same site, but collaborate remotely. Applications, tools and modes of communication that are used in data intensive visualization design scenarios are virtually unusable when collaborating remotely, even in second generation networks.

The Eucalyptus project was designed to be an example of what the future of Participatory Design may look like. The Eucalyptus project promises to deliver a much faster network infrastructure that will finally make fully participatory multi-site design possible. Two case studies have been used to show the technical configuration of the Eucalyptus project, prove that it can enable fully participatory multi-site design and speculate how the results of this project will change how Participatory Design is done in the future.

Participatory Design for Users with Severe Visual Impairments

Much can be learned from a study on designing a system for users with severe visual impairments. It was necessary to design a system that was capable of dealing with a wide selection of handling concepts. Participatory Design was effectively used to develop a way finding and object-recognition system. Assembling a good pool of members and utilizing Participatory Design was found to be essential in transforming the users’ actual needs and requirements into usable data.

Participatory Design on the Web

Using Participatory Design to Improve Web Sites

Participatory Design can be used to improve the user experience of a website. The Participatory Design process used for designing web sites can be broken down into three stages. The “Discovery” stage is were the designer gets to know the users, explore their work practices and identify their goals and needs. The “Evaluative” stage is were the users explore and evaluate the existing web site(s). They are asked to identify the strengths and weakness of the current design. The “Prototyping” stage involves the designers brainstorming with users as they suggest ideas for how the site should be implemented. This stage also includes the user evaluation of the new design and approval of the final version.

Participatory Design in an e-Learning Environment

The authors discuss a web 2.0 e-Learning environment and their study involving undergraduate students. Given that the students are the primary users of the software, the authors engaged them using PD methods to move actively involve them in refining the design of the system.

Participatory Design in Cross-Cultural Transfer of Knowledge

Thus far, descriptions of Participatory Design and the concepts contained within have repeatedly referenced the need to include societal influences in the design process. In general, this has meant that each of the stakeholders has a different vested interest, and a different perspective that influences their perception of the final product. With the ever-growing increase in global communications, PD faces an essential variation in its consideration of what ‘societal influences’ include.

Cross-cultural transfer of knowledge is a science within CSCW unto itself. Sharing information and ideas in ways that juxtapose country, language, and true ‘worldwide’ societal differences, henceforth referred to as ‘national traits’, is an area that a number of individuals in the IT field continue to work towards. A subset of this is where participatory design intersects. Individuals in participatory design are sharing a specific set of knowledge, and there are cross –cultural considerations for the knowledge itself, however the design implications become more valuable when shared for a system based on the national traits from each stakeholder.