Specialised medical workplaces such as dedicated endoscopy operating theatres are complex and so is the design process. Our goal is to deliver guidance for the design of dedicated endoscopic operating rooms by means of a participatory design approach. Currently, in the Netherlands, the design process of these workplaces is done by teams of stakeholders, supported by construction companies and vendors. Unfortunately, disappointment regarding the final design outcome is common. We conducted a number of interviews with stakeholders and a workshop to investigate the reasons for the disappointment. First studies indicate that the main reasons are (1) an absence of a future vision in the hospital, (2) a lack of genuine participation in the design process, (3) limited insight of stakeholders who participate in a planning team into the consequences of decisions and (4) limited use of the knowledge and information in hospitals available.

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While it is commonly claimed that users of participatory design projects reap benefits from their participation, little research exists that shows if this truly occurs in the real world. In this paper, we introduce the method and results of assessing the participants' perception of their personal benefits and the degree of participation in a large project in the healthcare field. Our research shows that a well-executed participatory design project can produce most of the benefits hypothesized in the literature but also highlights the challenges of assessing individual benefits and the PD process.

While the majority of participatory design (PD) research deals with the development of tools and the analysis of occurrences during workshops, we believe more research into the meaning and value of PD study results is needed to make PD more attractive to design practice.In this paper we present how forty participants of an ongoing one-year healthcare project interpret the outcomes of participatory design sessions with varying topics differently and what can be learned from that.We find that different workshop topics and different roles in the project lead to significant differences in how workshop outcomes are interpreted by individual participants, project managers, and researchers. These results illustrate the value of an inventory of the interpretations of individual participants of workshops results so that we are able to dynamically adjust successive sessions to match these perspectives and hence improve the success of the whole PD study.

In order to include persons with dementia in the MinD project actively, design probes were developed to provide insight into their perspectives. We applied probes due to their exploratory character and participation through self-documentation. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the design of the probes in relation to the outcomes as a source of inspiration for designers. More specifically, we investigate the openness and tangibility of the probes, and their content relating to the past, the current or the future. The five participants completed the probes to a large extent. The openness of assignments influenced their completion and the resulting value for empathizing and inspiration for designers: More defined assignments led to more sharing of personal and sensitive information than very open ones. While crafty, tangible assignments were filled in more extensively than less tangible ones, the classical writing assignments resulted more often in more introspective and reflective information from participants. Furthermore, participants filled in assignments about past memories more extensively than those relating to future goals.