Field Of Participatory Design Research Articles

Advancing Asset-Based Practice: Engagement, Ownership, and Outcomes in Participatory Design

This paper aims to understand how asset-based approaches can enhance how design researchers work with communities. Asset-based approaches support people to share perspectives of complex societal issues, recognize local strengths and capabilities, and apply these to inform action and change. Situated in the field of participatory design and drawing from a project investigating concepts of wellbeing with a volunteer community in the Scottish Highlands, the paper explores how an asset-based mindset can shape research methods, tools, and techniques. This establishes practices of appreciative exploration, collaborative articulation, and creative activation. Advancing a model of asset-based practice, it proposes how design researchers can enrich their engagement with contexts and communities, strengthen participants’ ownership over the process, and co-design outputs to communicate experiences and insights to multiple stakeholders and audiences.

User-defined gesture interaction for in-vehicle information systems

Gesture elicitation study, a technique emerging from the field of participatory design, has been extensively applied in emerging interaction and sensing technologies in recent years. However, traditional gesture elicitation study often suffers from the gesture disagreement and legacy bias problem and may not generate optimal gestures for a target system. This paper reports a research project on user-defined gestures for interacting with in-vehicle information systems. The main contribution of our research lies in a 3-stage, participatory design method we propose for deriving more reliable gestures than traditional gesture elicitation methods. Using this method, we generated a set of user-defined gestures for secondary tasks in an in-vehicle information system. Drawing on our research, we develop a set of design guidelines for freehand gesture design. We highlight the implications of this work for the gesture elicitation for all gestural interfaces.

Designing Digital Technology for Service Work: Systematic and Participatory Approach

AbstractDigital technology is dramatically changing our life, industry, and society. Recent evolution of digital technology is expected to significantly impact service work, such as healthcare and social welfare. Meanwhile, an insufficient understanding of service work and workers' needs leads to the failure of technology development and integration. To make digital technology better fit to values and work practices of service workers, various studies have been conducted, especially in the field of participatory design, interaction design, and service design. However, the contribution of engineering design to this topic is still limited. This paper proposes an engineering design approach to design digital technology for better integration in service work. This study combines a modelling method to represent specifications of digital technology and the participatory approach in alignment with the changing service work and workers' values. A case study of the mobile application system for elderly-care professionals is introduced to exemplify the effectiveness of the proposed method. This study intends to foster innovation of service work through digitalization.

‘Dismantle, change, build’: Designing abolition at the intersections of local, large-scale, and imagined infrastructures

As a theory and practice within the field of participatory design, infrastructuring holds complex intersections between people, groups, technologies, systems, and ideologies in view. Building on other researchers in participatory design, this article argues for an approach to infrastructuring that focuses on how we do, and create capacity to do, the work of infrastructuring locally with people and groups affected by and working in relation to the systems we seek to engage. These dynamics are explored in the literature and through a case story of an embedded design engagement with a social justice organization, where our focus and the relational practices we designed through long-term work together were shaped by the intersections of local, large-scale, and imagined infrastructures central to their organizing work.

Architectural Education in the Arab World and Its Role in Facing the Contemporary Local and Regional Challenges

This research discusses the academic architectural education and its role in facing the challenges caused by the Arab revolutions that commenced in 2011, also known as “The Arab Spring”. It begins with a review of the most important issues of the present Arab world and continues by demonstrating the role of architecture in developing society and improving the quality of life. It also explores the appropriate architecture for the current phase, which must be design-based with a humanitarian-social dimension and respect to both “sustainability” and “participation”. Subsequently, the need to review the academic architectural education is addressed so that it convoys the current developments of society and becomes able to shape and create architects qualified in the field of the desired architecture. This may be done by introducing new resolutions related to social architecture, launching the Design/Build studio alongside traditional architecture studios, and indulging students in the field of participatory design. In addition, architectural research of students and their graduation projects should be directed to address the local issues, aiming to serve society and promote its development. Finally, recommendations to universities and higher education institutes are raised so that they can act their intended role in the development and improvement of their societies.

In pursuit of rigour and accountability in participatory design

The field of Participatory Design (PD) has greatly diversified and we see a broad spectrum of approaches and methodologies emerging. However, to foster its role in designing future interactive technologies, a discussion about accountability and rigour across this spectrum is needed. Rejecting the traditional, positivistic framework, we take inspiration from related fields such as Design Research and Action Research to develop interpretations of these concepts that are rooted in PD׳s own belief system. We argue that unlike in other fields, accountability and rigour are nuanced concepts that are delivered through debate, critique and reflection. A key prerequisite for having such debates is the availability of a language that allows designers, researchers and practitioners to construct solid arguments about the appropriateness of their stances, choices and judgements.To this end, we propose a “tool-to-think-with” that provides such a language by guiding designers, researchers and practitioners through a process of systematic reflection and critical analysis. The tool proposes four lenses to critically reflect on the nature of a PD effort: epistemology, values, stakeholders and outcomes. In a subsequent step, the coherence between the revealed features is analysed and shows whether they pull the project in the same direction or work against each other. Regardless of the flavour of PD, we argue that this coherence of features indicates the level of internal rigour of PD work and that the process of reflection and analysis provides the language to argue for it. We envision our tool to be useful at all stages of PD work: in the planning phase, as part of a reflective practice during the work, and as a means to construct knowledge and advance the field after the fact. We ground our theoretical discussions in a specific PD experience, the ECHOES project, to motivate the tool and to illustrate its workings.

Three roles for textiles as tangible working materials in co-designprocesses

Textiles are increasingly complex materials used in a growing number of applications, e.g. in architecture. The textile industry must therefore engage with other professions when developing both textiles and products of which textiles are a part. In this article, we argue that tools taken from the field of participatory design represent a potential for staging such co-design situations and report on our experience from a co-design process where architects, engineers and textile experts engaged in designing future textile solutions for Danish hospital environments. During this process we used what we call tangible working materials to stage the collaboration between the stakeholders engaged as co-designers. Our experience using the tangible working materials showed us that they can be divided into three types, with different attributes and roles in the design process: real, mediating and representative materials.

Addressing users' health issues in software development – an exploratory study

In this paper we argue that occupational health expertise should be directly involved in the software design process, and describe an exploratory study where health experts and users participated in the analysis, design and evaluation of a prototype. We addressed the problem of poor overview and control in electronic case handling. We used methods primarily from the participatory design field in combination with a framework describing some of the main risk factors for stress-related disorders in VDU work. We conducted observation interviews where the questions were based on the risk factors of high demand, low control and poor support. The interviews were the main lever for addressing these factors and making them ‘visible’ in the process. They could then be turned into requirements, design criteria and scenarios that we used as a basis for our design.