At the core of Participatory Design is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of tools, products, environments, businesses, and social institutions. In particular, Participatory Design has developed a diverse collection of principles and practices to encourage and support this direct involvement. Many of the design tools and techniques generated to further this process have become standard practice for the design and development of information and communications technologies and increasingly other kinds of products and services. These design tools and techniques include various kinds of design workshops in which participants collaboratively envision future practices and products; scenarios, personas and related tools that enable people to represent their own activities to others (rather than having others do this for them); various forms of mock-ups, prototypes and enactment of current and future activities used to coordinate the design process; and iterative prototyping so that participants can interrogate developing designs and ground their design conversations in the desired outcomes of the design process and the context in which these will be used. 1 Participatory Design has also pioneered and developed some of the basic research questions, methods, and agendas that have recently been taken up by design research in more traditional design environments (e.g., innovation through participation). 2 Increasingly, participatory designers have sought to develop processes to enable active stakeholder participation in the design of the tools, environments, businesses, and social institutions in which these information and communication technologies are embedded. These widened contexts have been reflected in the themes of recent Participatory Design conferences and in the substantive focus of the research presented in them. Participatory Design: A Brief OverviewThe beginnings of contemporary Participatory Design lie primarily in the restless and exhilarating days of the various social, political and civil rights movements the 1960s and 1970s. People in many western societies demanded an increased say in the decisions that affected many different aspects of their lives. Some designers and design researchers participated very directly in these activities and 1 Jesper Simonsen and Toni Robertson, eds., Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design (London: Routledge, 2012). 2 Jesper Simonsen et al., eds., Design Research: Synergies from Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2010).
The article presents a conceptual framework and a coherent method for design in an organizational context within the participatory design tradition. The MUST method has been developed throughout 10 projects in Danish and American organizations, and it has recently been evaluated and adopted by 3 Danish organizations. The method is based on thorough participation with users and managers, and it combines the use of ethnographic techniques and intervention. The article describes the application area and perspective of the method, presents 6 general principles on which the method is based, and describes 5 main activities providing a stepwise decision-making process in the overall design process. Each of the main activities are illustrated by an example taken from our last project. The article concludes by summing up the main points.
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