Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design

Jesper Simonsen, Toni Robertson, Jesper Simonsen, Toni Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415694407
• eBook ISBN: 9781136266256
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Design General
• Index: Social Sciences

Participatory design is about the direct involvement of people in the co-design of the technologies they use. Its central concern is how collaborative design processes can be driven by the participation of the people affected by the technology designed. Embracing a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses, and social institutions more responsive to human needs, the International Handbook of Participatory Design is a state-of-the-art reference handbook for the subject.

The Handbook brings together a multidisciplinary and international group of highly recognized and experienced experts to present an authoritative overview of the field and its history and discuss contributions and challenges of the pivotal issues in participatory design, including heritage, ethics, ethnography, methods, tools and techniques and community involvement. The book also highlights three large-scale case studies which show how participatory design has been used to bring about outstanding changes in different organizations.

The book shows why participatory design is an important, highly relevant and rewarding area for research and practice. It will be an invaluable resource for students, researchers, scholars and professionals in participatory design.

Participatory Design An introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203108543-1

The aim of this book is to provide a current account of the commitments and contributions of research and practice in the Participatory Design of information technologies. An overview of the central concepts that have defined and shaped the field is provided as an introduction to the more detailed focus of later chapters. The target audience is identified and the structure of the book explained. A short description of each chapter highlights its particular contributions as well as the associated challenges facing designers and researchers engaged in participatory approaches. The chapter concludes with some guidance and recommendations for further reading.

An introduction to Participatory Design is followed by explanations of how practitioners and researchers in the field understand participation and practice and how design is approached as a process driven by social interaction and engagement. The structure of the book is described, individual chapters introduced and further relevant publications listed.

Essentially this chapter introduces, motivates and grounds the book and the chapters that follow. It provides basic definitions of the core concepts of Participatory Design and explains both their origins and ongoing relations to the motivations and commitments of researchers and practitioners who use participatory approaches in their work. The chapter provides the foundation to account for the structure of the book: one section focusing on some of the different perspectives in the field and their particular contributions and challenges and another section that presents case studies of three outstanding applications of Participatory Design.

If we are to design the futures we wish to live, then we need those whose futures they will be to actively participate in their design. This is why it is so important that Participatory Design keeps developing the design processes, tools, techniques and methods needed to enable full and active participation in all kinds of design activities.

Introdction

The beginnings of Participatory Design lie among the various social, political and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s, when people in many Western societies demanded an increased say in decision-making about different aspects of their lives and were prepared to participate in collective action around shared interests and values. Some designers and design researchers responded to these events by investigating how they might relate to their own practices. For example, the theme for the 1971 conference of the Design Research Society, held in Manchester, was Design Participation (Cross 1972) and, around the same time, some architects and town planners began to seek ways to involve people in the design of various aspects of their everyday built environments (e.g. Sanoff 1978). The Participatory Design of information technology was pioneered in Europe and especially in Scandinavia as part of what became known as the workplace democracy movement during the 1970s (e.g. Nygaard and Bergo 1975; Sandberg 1979; Bjerknes et al. 1983). In particular it was a response to the transformation of workplaces driven by the introduction of computers. The aim was to provide people with better tools for doing their jobs, eventually enabling them to extend their skills while automating the tedious and repetitive parts of work. It is the motivation behind this aim and the context from which it emerged that has been so important to the development of Participatory Design.

The focus of this book is the tradition of Participatory Design that originated in Scandinavia and has concentrated on the design of information and communications technologies and technology-enabled systems (we will refer to these in the remainder of this book more simply as information technologies). At the heart of this tradition is an unshakable commitment to ensuring that those who will use information technologies play a critical role in their design. As such, the Participatory Design tradition is defined by a perspective that always looks forward to the shaping of future situations. A diverse collection of Participatory Design principles and practices has been developed, driven by ongoing efforts to deepen our understanding of how collaborative design processes can enable the participation of those who will, in the future, be affected by their results. Increasingly, designers committed to participatory approaches have extended their concerns to involving people in the design of the tools, environments, businesses and social institutions in which these technologies are embedded.

While Participatory Design has matured as a research discipline and field of design practice, it has been some years since a comprehensive volume of writings on the field has been published. In that time many of its insights, tools and techniques have become part of other design fields. Other designers and researchers have begun to use participatory approaches in their own work and new generations of both have sought to contribute to and extend the project that unites the different expressions of Participatory Design: directly involving people in the co-design of the artefacts, processes and environments that shape their lives.

The aim of this book is to provide a current account of the commitments and contributions of Participatory Design. In essence, Participatory Design can be defined as

a process of investigating, understanding, reflecting upon, establishing, developing, and supporting mutual learning between multiple participants in collective ‘reflection-inaction’. The participants typically undertake the two principal roles of users and designers where the designers strive to learn the realities of the users’ situation while the users strive to articulate their desired aims and learn appropriate technological means to obtain them.

These two principal roles reflect two fundamental aspects of Participatory Design. The first is that it seeks to enable those who will use the technology to have a voice in its design, without needing to speak the language of professional technology design. This is achieved through interactions with prototypes, mock-ups and other tools that can represent developing systems and future practices. The second is that people who are not professional technology designers may not be able to define what they want from a design process, without knowing what is possible. A process of mutual learning for both designers and users can inform all participants’ capacities to envisage future technologies and the practices in which they can be embedded.

By ‘designers’ we mean, at least initially, those participants who are professionally ‘responsible for the information technology design project, underscoring the importance of the element of design in such projects and, in turn, the analogy to the function of the architect in construction’ (Bødker et al. 2011, p. 117). By ‘users’ we refer to those participants who will interact with the information technologies being designed. But while this identification of the two principal roles of designers and users is useful in any simple definition of Participatory Design, in practice the roles have at times been contested and generally used with some unease. Throughout this book these roles will be challenged and elaborated to include much more than just one group’s design of technology and another group’s use of it. This is not just because changing technologies have continued to blur both the separation of designers and users as well as much of the gap between design and use. It is also because in Participatory Design the relations between humans and information technologies have always differentiated (among others) the users, who apply the technology for certain purposes; the customers, who order and pay for it; employees and management, who, because Participatory Design is also a political process, are involved in different ways in the conflicts and dilemmas that accompany it; and other participants, who might have first-, second-and third-hand knowledge of use-processes that, in turn, entail consequences for the tools and techniques which are helpful and relevant to apply in bringing that knowledge to bear (ibid.).

Many of the authors of the different chapters in this book have explicitly stressed that Participatory Design is not defined by formulas, rules and strict definitions but by a commitment to core principles of participation in design. These, in turn, are informed by a rich heritage of projects, methods, tools and techniques that we can bring to bear on each specific design context in which we participate. Both the shared principles of Participatory Design and many of the ways these have been expressed and experienced have informed the structure of this book and are examined from different perspectives in its pages.

We continue in this introductory chapter by providing an overview of the central concepts of Participatory Design. We discuss the motivation behind its basic commitment to participation, what we understand by participation and practice, and how design is understood as a process driven by social interaction and engagement. From there the chapter identifies its target audiences and explains the structure of the book, paying particular attention to how its chapters articulate the contributions of Participatory Design as well as the challenges that lie ahead. For those who want to read more, the chapter closes with some suggestions for further reading and provides a comprehensive list of Participatory Design publications.

Taking a stand

Writing of the early Scandinavian Participatory Design projects of the 1970s and 1980s, Morten Kyng observed: ‘As part of the transformation of the workplace working conditions for many end users have changed dramatically, and not always for the better’ (1988, p. 178). Discussions about these changes, between designers, users, trade unions and other stakeholders, highlighted that when those who would use these new computer-based systems were not actively involved and influential in their development and use, they were unable to create visions of future working conditions and practices that would improve or even match their current ones. Participatory Design researchers and trade unions initiated a range of activities to question existing approaches to the computerisation of the workplace and to influence legislation on the changing work environment. Active involvement from those who would use these systems was the key characteristic of these newly initiated activities; they were intended to achieve their aims through creating visions of different kinds of future workplaces and practices and to design the new computer-based systems that would shape them (ibid.). This meant that new ways of designing systems needed to be developed that, in turn, relied on finding new ways of cooperating between users and designers.

Then, as now, participatory designers viewed those who would use the new technologies as experts in their work domains while the designers acted as experts in theirs, contributing as experts and facilitators of the design process, technical consultants and often through involvement in the actual development of new systems. So Participatory Design was, in the first instance, about designing information technologies that would allow people to change and further develop their work practices to incorporate both the use of computer systems and improved working conditions. Its roots in the workplace democracy movement meant that those whose new work practices were being designed were centrally engaged in the process. This engagement was itself defined and enabled by the development of new design methods, tools and techniques that were intended to enable all those involved in the design process to imagine and move towards new visions of the future.

The commitments of Participatory Design to new ways of designing and to people’s agency in shaping their work marked a clear move away from the formalised models of work that were, at the time, dominant in information systems design, business planning and related areas. Joan Greenbaum and Morten Kyng devoted a major part of their introduction to Design at Work (Greenbaum and Kyng 1991a, pp. 1–24) to critiquing the cultural, political and economic values inherent in formalised models of human activities and explicitly connected these models to the deeply rooted practices of the rationalist tradition of Western philosophy. They cited the summary provided by Winograd and Flores (1986, p. 15) of how these practices characterise situations in terms of identifiable objects with well-defined properties; find general rules that apply to situations in terms of those objects and properties; and then apply the rules logically to the situation of concern in order to draw conclusions about what should be done (Greenbaum and Kyng 1991a, p. 7). The effects include a top-down view of the organisation that formalises work into disembodied, algorithmic procedures and makes invisible the social, embodied and contingent nature of everyday work practices. Indeed, critiques of formalised representations of work are common in the early Participatory Design and related literature (e.g. Suchman 1983, 1987, 1995; Ehn and Kyng 1984; Kyng 1988, 1995; Greenbaum and Kyng 1991a; Star 1991). These critiques extended to the way such models informed developing approaches to system development contributing both to the failure of new systems and to the reduced workplace conditions that had motivated the early Participatory Design initiatives.

Traditional methods and practices are firmly rooted in engineering and natural sciences origins of computer science. They are designed for implementing clear-cut specifications (as if such things exist), but they are far removed from actual practice. In fact, traditional methods, with their emphasis on step-by-step procedures, effectively prevent creative and cooperative sparks between system designers and users.

(Greenbaum and Kyng 1991b, p....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Participatory Design An introduction
• SECTION I Participatory Design – contributions and challenges
• SECTION II Outstanding applications of Participatory Design
• Index