What Is Participatory Design?

Abstract

Participatory Design, User-Centered Design, People Centered Design, User-oriented Design, Hu-man-Centered Design, Contextual Design, Co-design, Cooperative Design, Experience Design, or just simply Interaction Design. The literature on design approaches that incorporate elements of people engagement in design of computer technologies is promoted under different headings and in different research communities. Being new to design approaches, the differences between these different trajectories might seem confusing and perhaps even insignificant in relation to a design task at hand. However, there is a very good reason for seeking alignment between the approach you choose and the design task at hand. In the following, we will continue to extract the defining elements of Participatory Design. We do this to provide an overview of Participatory Design, to emphasize its uniqueness, and to point ahead to other chapters for further explanations of concepts, history, methods, and domains of application.