Participatory Design Activities Research Articles

The Aboriginal Youth Mentorship Program (AYMP): A Peer-Led Healthy Living After-School Program for Achieving Healthy Weights in First Nations Children Living in a Northern Remote Setting

Few school-based programs that promote healthy weights to Aboriginal youth living in rural communities have been empirically tested. Using a participatory action design, we tried to overcome this limitation by testing the efficacy of a peer-led after-school mentoring program for improving measures of healthy weights in grade 4 students in a remote fly-in community in Northern Manitoba. This was a non-randomized experimental trial with a parallel non-equivalent control group delivered for 5 months during the 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 school years. The intervention was offered as a weekly after-school program facilitated by volunteer high school mentors to grade 4 students, while students in grade 5 served as controls. Outcome measures included waist circumference (WC), body mass index z-score (BMI-z), healthy living knowledge (HLK), self-efficacy, and body image. Of the 151 students studied 72.67% were overweight/obese and 42% were girls. The change in WC was significantly attenuated in children who received the intervention compared to those that did not (0.39 ± 0.66 cm vs. 3.4 ± 1.37 cm; p= 0.0001). A similar trend was observed for BMI-z score group (-0.05 ± 0.03 vs. 0.07 ± 0.2), however this did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.199). No significant differences were observed in HLK, however a trend towards improved self-efficacy was noted. We found that the Aboriginal Youth Mentorship Program is successful in attenuating WC in Aboriginal youth living in a remote First Nation community. The success of this pilot study provides the foundation for future school-based peer-led interventions among Aboriginal students in rural communities.

Theatre, PlayDoh and Comic Strips: Designing Organic User Interfaces with Young Adolescent and Teenage Participants

This paper presents the process and outputs from a participatory design activity with secondary school children whose task was to design organic user interfaces (OUIs) for use in energy-aware applications. Although experienced in participatory design sessions with children and teenagers, the design team faced three new challenges in this work: how to convey the idea of OUIs, how to facilitate the pupils to design OUIs and how to interpret the OUI design ideas. To convey the ideas of OUI, the Obstructed Theatre method, used in other studies with children and teenagers, was used. In this work, the salient features of the OUI conveyed in the theatre were: its malleability, its potential to bend and change shape, its association with the body and its novelty. To facilitate the design, three scenarios of increasing user interface complexity were conveyed in the theatre; and three different media (i) slime and pipe cleaners, (ii) PlayDoh and small Lego bricks, (iii) fabric and sticky shapes that afforded the creation of designs representing future organic interactive technologies were deployed. To enable the design team to make sense of the resulting designs, a Comic Strip approach was used to capture the changes in the designs as they demonstrated interaction. The paper explores this work from three perspectives; first, the effectiveness of the Obstructed Theatre approach to convey requirements of OUIs, secondly, the effectiveness of the three media used in the design sessions to encourage design solutions for OUIs and thirdly, the quality and relevance of the design ideas generated in the sessions and communicated to the design team using the Comic Strips and their applicability to other contexts. The paper concludes with some thoughts on methods and materials that could be used to encourage design ideas for OUIs and offers some of the participants more innovative ideas for the research and development community. © 2013 The Author.

Towards a new work practice in the development of e-government applications

This paper proposes a novel approach to the development of e–government applications for citizens and public administration employees. The approach has been derived by following a methodology based on participatory action research and design science. The general goal is favouring an organisation change internally to government agencies, among different agencies, and between citizens and public administration. Therefore, the paper delineates how the current work practice for e–government service development could be improved, by proposing a set of methods and tools that foster the active participation of civil servants. To show how the new work practice could take place, the creation of an example service is discussed. Positive feedbacks from real users suggest that the approach represents a promising research direction in the e–government domain.

On participatory design of home-based healthcare

Participatory design (PD) activities in private homes challenge how we relate to the PD process, compared to PD in professional settings. Grounded in a project related to chronic dizziness among older people, we identified four challenges when performing PD with ill, weak users in their private homes. The challenges are (1) designing for, and negotiating knowledge about, the home, (2) ill, weak users and their participation in PD, (3) divergent interests of participants and (4) usable and sustainable post-project solutions. These challenges have to be carefully addressed, and we use them to reflect upon differences between a home-based PD process with non-workers, such as ours, and work-place projects, such as Utopia. Through this reflection, the paper contributes to a more general discussion on PD in non-work settings with weak users. Indeed, differences do exist between traditional PD projects in work settings, such as Utopia, and home-based PD with weak users especially in relation to knowledge about settings and how to reconcile differences in interests. The home as a place for (technology-assisted) treatment and PD must be carefully analyzed. Diverse interests and roles as well as possibilities for post-project solutions should be negotiated among all stakeholders.

Towards Participatory Action Design Research: Adapting Action Research and Design Science Research Methods for Urban Informatics

This paper proposes a new research method, Participatory Action Design Research (PADR), for studies in the Urban Informatics (UI) domain. PADR supports UI research in developing new technological means (e.g. using mobile and ubiquitous computing) to resolve contemporary issues or support everyday life in urban environments. Situated in a socio-technical context, UI requires a close dialogue between social and design-oriented fields of research as well as their methods. PADR combines Action Research and Design Science Research, both of which are used in Information Systems, another field with a strong socio-technical emphasis, and further adapts them to the cross-disciplinary needs and research context of UI.

WHEN ROLE PLAYING IS NOT ENOUGH: IMPROVED UNIVERSAL DESIGN EDUCATION

In this paper the principles of Universal Design (UD) are discussed in the context of design education. The application of the concepts of UD to building and urban design has ensured a better quality of life for users with disabilities, however, to create an accessible environment the design profession needs to adopt new attitudes and the design process and its teaching strategies must change. Design education is discussed in relation to role-playing and participatory design activities. A teaching experience is presented, with the goal to develop student awareness of users with special needs. New design communication instruments were developed, such as tactile maps, to enable user participation of the visually impaired. Design is primarily based on visual communication and visually impaired users were included in the teaching experience in view of their inability to evaluate typical design documentation, such as drawings and models. Role-playing, as a means of bringing students closer to the issues of users with disabilities, was shown to be insufficient and the creation of a collaborative design process was important to increase student’s sensitivity. The active participation of users with disabilities ensured that future professionals gained a deeper understanding of user needs and were able to create appropriate and quality environment. The inclusion of visually impaired users in the design process is seen as original in design pedagogies. The use of tactile maps for design documentation was shown to be an important contribution to research in the area of design methods. Some research questions arose from the teaching experience, relating to technical details of tactile map production, as well as pedagogical and ethical issues involved in participatory design.

Social software and academic practice: Postgraduate students as co-designers of Web 2.0 tools

In order to develop potentially transformative Web 2.0 tools in higher education, the complexity of existing academic practices, including current patterns of technology use, must be recognised. This paper describes how a series of participatory design activities allowed postgraduate students in education, social sciences and computer sciences to contribute to the development of new Web 2.0 tools to enhance an existing virtual collaboration environment. In the course of these design activities, students reflected on and articulated the existing and emerging academic practices in which they were involved as they managed their transition from undergraduate courses to postgraduate research. The tools that were developed can therefore be seen as reifications of participants' emerging academic practices and the challenges they face as new researchers. This highlights the need for flexible design approaches and adaptable technological frameworks if Web 2.0 tools are to be successfully integrated into higher education settings.

The Brisbane Media Map: participatory design and authentic learning to link students and industry

The Brisbane Media Map is both an online resource and a tertiary-level authentic learning project. The Brisbane Media Map is an online database which provides a detailed overview of about 600 media industry organisations in Brisbane, Australia. In addition to providing contact details and synopses for each organisation’s profile, the Brisbane Media Map also includes supplementary information on current issues, trends, and individuals in the media and communication industry sectors. This resource is produced and updated annually by final-year undergraduate Media and Communication students. This article introduces the Brisbane Media Map, its functionality and systems design approach, as well as its alignment with key learning infrastructures. It examines authentic learning as the pedagogical framework underpinning the ongoing development work of the resource and highlights some synergies of this framework with participatory design principles. The Brisbane Media Map is a useful example of an authentic learning approach that successfully engages students of non-traditional and non-design areas of study in human-computer interaction, usability, and participatory design activities.

Relationships, trust, decision-making and quality of care in a paediatric intensive care unit

To assess the care-giving practices of health-care practitioners in the paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) through their qualitative insights, reflections and experience in participatory action research. Qualitative research in the form of 'participatory action research' was used to gather data from three sources within the unit: focus groups within disciplines, observations within the PICU, and semi-structured interviews. All staff members were active collaborators and equal stakeholders in the decision-making process, research and feedback. The paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) of the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital (RCWMCH). All staff members from various disciplines working in the PICU. Staff members described problems with respect to relationships, trust and decision-making within care-giving practices. The study qualitatively describes how poor communication amongst staff members in respect of relationships and decision-making impacted on trust and how this tended to compromise care-giving practices in the PICU. The data suggested that this was more evident in informal rather than formal clinical decision-making procedures. The strength of the study was that the participatory action design in the research allowed staff members to address the very dynamics that they themselves cited as problematic.

The importance of personal medicine: A qualitative study of resilience in people with psychiatric disabilities

Resilience does not refer to a magical state of invulnerability and the capacity for resilience does not end when one is diagnosed with a prolonged disorder or disease. Despite the enduring legacy of pessimism regarding resilience in the population of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders, a majority do recover. The present study seeks to understand how people with psychiatric disorders demonstrate the capacity for resilience in the ways they use or do not use psychiatric medications in their daily lives. A qualitative method and participatory action design was used to analyze interviews with 29 people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders. When discussing their use of psychiatric medications, research participants also talked about non-pharmaceutical, personal medicine. Personal medicine was found to be those activities that gave life meaning and purpose, and that served to raise self-esteem, decrease symptoms, and avoid unwanted outcomes such as hospitalization. When psychiatric medications interfered with non-pharmaceutical personal medicine, non-adherence often occurred. People with psychiatric disorders demonstrate resilience through the use of non-pharmaceutical, personal medicine in the recovery process. This understanding suggests that medication adherence may be improved when clinicians inquire about patients' personal medicine and use pharmaceuticals to support, rather than interfere with, these self-assessed health resources.

The meaning of permanency in child welfare: Multiple stakeholder perspectives

This study was designed to deepen our understanding of permanency for the children and families served by New York City's foster care system. The researchers explored the meaning and importance of “permanency” to the various stakeholders in the system by examining how the concept of permanency is understood by individuals most directly affected: young people who have experienced foster care, the parents of children who have been or currently are in foster care, adoptive parents, and child welfare professionals. The study utilized a participatory action design (PAD) in which young adults formerly in foster care, parents of children currently in foster care, parents who had been reunified with their children, and adoptive parents actively contributed to the design and implementation of the study. The interview protocols used a semi-structured format organized around four central concept domains: the meaning of permanency, permanency goals and options, the permanency planning process, and post-permanency outcomes. The interview protocols were comprised of a series of open-ended questions designed to explore the respondent's experiences with permanency planning. All interview protocols were translated into Spanish. Study results indicate that despite the presumed clarity regarding the definition of permanency, individuals most directly affected by “permanency” efforts often do not understand the implications of permanency for themselves or how this principle applies in child welfare practice. Recommendations for strengthening permanency practice are discussed.

Cooperative Design, Development, and Management of Interdisciplinary Data to Support the Global Environmental Change Research Community

This article describes the organizational, collaborative, and project management processes of a scientific data center that serves the interdisciplinary global environmental change research community. Collaborating with representatives of the user community, the data center identifies, acquires, ingests, manages, and disseminates research-related information (RRI), such as scientific data and documents. Users and software developers cooperatively design online applications that integrate these resources into a wide variety of information products and services to be disseminated through a digital library to the globally dispersed community. Results from these participatory design and cooperative development activities include Web-based resource catalogs, training, peer education, help desk, and reference services to support scientific communication and decision-making among members of the interdisciplinary community.

User Advocacy in Participatory Design: Designers' Experiences with a New Communication Channel

We report on participatory design activities within the PoliTeam project, a large project which introduces groupware into the German government. Working with a representative small group of users in different worksites, an existing system was adapted to user and organizational needs, with the plan to improve and expand the system to a large scale. We integrated new approaches of user advocacy and osmosis with an evolutionary cycling process. User advocates and osmosis were techniques used to explore the users‘ needs during actual system use. These techniques were incorporated into the system development. In this paper, we present experiences with this approach and reflect on its impact on the design process from the designers‘ point of view.

Activity analysis in participatory design and analysis of participatory design activity

Most ergonomic publications from French-speaking countries refer to Activity Analysis as the core of their rationale and their methodological approach (De Keyser, 1991; Wisner, 1989). On the other hand, the same ergonomists are increasingly involved in the participatory approaches to industrial design processes. The aim of this paper is to discuss some questions, or even some paradoxes, raised by this development: (1) To what extent can any reference to Activity Analysis be useful when design is concerned, since activity in future situations cannot be observed? (2) Is ergonomic Activity Analysis necessary when a participatory approach is involved, assuming the fact that the workers involved know everything about their own work? (3) Is there no contradiction between Activity Analysis as a bottom-up approach, and systemic design, which is more a top-down process (Hendrick, 1993)? This contribution is based on two long-term participatory interventions in the design of complete plants that are fully presented and discussed elsewhere (Daniellou and Garrigou, 1990; Daniellou et al., 1990). Section 1 discusses the role of Activity Analysis in a participatory design process. Section 2 presents the results of an a posteriori analysis of the participatory process in one of the two interventions.