ABSTRACT
Abstract: Only twenty years ago, participatory design (PD) seemed to North Americans a curious Scandinavian perspective. Today, it is widely employed in community informatics, and increasingly in commercial development practices as well. We survey PD from the standpoint of six dimensions of participation: participatory impetus, ownership, scope of design, nature of the participatory process, scope of cooperation, and expectations about learning and human development. Using these dimensions as a framework, we analyze several traditional and emerging models for PD: the original European model (illustrated by the Utopia project); the early North American model (illustrated by the PICTIVE method), and recent variations involving long-term participatory interactions oriented to role development; and an embedded participant model emphasizing facilitation of user initiatives. We discuss when and how various PD approaches are most useful. Keywords: Participatory Design, Cooperative Design, User-Centered Design
INTRODUCTION
One of the chief lessons learned from the past thirty years of design studies is the recognition of the range and amount of knowledge involved in design. This lesson was not the discrete result of a research program that determined the scope and nature of design knowledge. Indeed, one can see the “new” design methods of the 1970s as a rather concerted effort to push toward a general (that is, domain knowledge free) kit of techniques (Jones, 1970). Nonetheless, the lesson has crept up on us over the years. No longer are customer interviews and focus groups regarded as a comprehensive method for gathering design requirements. Concepts such as stakeholders, trade-offs, design rationale, emergent requirements, design patterns, tacit knowledge, and invisible work have increasingly complicated the picture. Theoretical perspectives such as situated action (Suchman, 1987), activity theory (Nardi, 1996), distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995), and sociotechnical systems theory (Eason, 1988) have called attention to the critical role of context in design. These perspectives have promoted a broadening of the design problem to include a variety of mediating artifacts, social networks and communities, norms, division of labor, and roles. Today, users are conceptualized as embedded in communities of practice whose knowledge, including self-knowledge, is enacted rather than effable, in the traditional sense of requirements. What are we to do?
