Providing a critical view on user participation in design, disentangling decision making and powe... more Providing a critical view on user participation in design, disentangling decision making and power in design, this book uses fieldwork material from two large participatory design projects: one experimental in the field of urban planning, the other a product development project within health care. Addressing power issues in participatory design is critical to providing a realistic view of the possibilities and limitations of participation. Design is decision-making: during a design process a huge number of decisionstaken before the designers end up with a design result - an artefact or system. All decisions are a choice between possibilities and selecting one of them and making it concrete as a change in an artefact is a demonstration of the capacity to transform, which is a key aspect of power. Participatory designers are committed to empowering users and facilitating a design process where users are able to take part in all types of decisions. This volume explores the challenges for practitioners of participatory design arising from this commitment by asking what participation really means: who should participate and in which parts of a design process; what does it mean to share power with users; how are decisions to be made in a participatory way and what is it that users participate in? The book provides a conceptual framework for understanding these issues as well as a fresh look at participation.
Participatory Design is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technolo... more Participatory Design is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses, and social institutions more responsive to human needs. A central tenet of Participatory Design is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of things and technologies they use. Participatory Design Conferences have been held every two years since 1990 and have formed an important venue for international discussion of the collaborative, social, and political dimensions of technology innovation and use. The conferences started as a dialogue about user involvement in IT systems development between, on the one hand, Scandinavian scholars and promoters and, on the other hand, Europeans and Americans interested in how the Scandinavian experience could be adopted and extended. Since then, the conference agendas have broadened to address participatory approaches in a variety of other arenas, including communications, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), healthcare, new media, architecture, the arts, and others. PDCs bring together a multidisciplinary and international group of software developers, researchers, social scientists, managers, designers, practitioners, users, cultural workers, activists and citizens who both advocate and adopt distinctively participatory approaches in the development of information and communication artefacts, systems, services and technology. A central concern has always been to understand how collaborative design processes can be driven by the participation of the people affected by the technology designed.
Juhani Iivari’s rich discussion essay about information systems as a design science serves the go... more Juhani Iivari’s rich discussion essay about information systems as a design science serves the goal of triggering a debate about research on information systems (IS). The essay is a reflective piece, and the historic approach to IS research taken by Iivari succeeds in opening up for a discussion about several
on System Development Scandinavian research projects in system development have traditionally put... more on System Development Scandinavian research projects in system development have traditionally put a strong emphasis on user participation as a strategy for increasing working life democracy. The article analyses a few of these projects with respect to this goal. We argue that there has been a development from politics to ethics in system development research, and that the political dimension should be reintroduced. A reorientation of system development strategies aiming at increasing working life democracy can learn from the historical success stories, in particular the combination of global strategy and local action used in the trade union projects in the 60’s. Recent development in technology and working life will, however, introduce new challenges to system development.
In this paper, we report on a participatory design (PD) process with old users. We discuss how we... more In this paper, we report on a participatory design (PD) process with old users. We discuss how we organized and carried out the process so that our users could participate in the mutual learning and co-construction activities on their own terms. When organizing the process we had to take into account the limited capacity for design participation of our users but also build on the capacities they have. The paper describes our PD approach and what we did to facilitate participation from our old users, emphasizing recruiting, timing, continuity, representativity, and immediacy. The paper also discusses which design decisions the users participated in and how they influenced the design result. We analyse how they brought in design possibilities (choices), selected, concretized and evaluated them, and also how the final design result bears traces of their participation.
Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Situated Actions, Workshops and Tutorial - Volume 2, 2018
In this paper1, we explore if and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) challenges Participatory Desig... more In this paper1, we explore if and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) challenges Participatory Design (PD). We base our analysis on the basic characteristics of AI and its subfield Machine Learning and discuss how and what kinds of design decisions users are able to participate in when technology that includes AI is designed. We conclude that AI challenges PD but that classic PD methods can be useful for parts of the design process. However, AI poses new challenges to PD all originating in the fact that AI technologies change unpredictably over time.
COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 23-27 May 2016, Trento, Italy, 2016
The paper explores the question why a design process ends up with a particular result. We analyze... more The paper explores the question why a design process ends up with a particular result. We analyze a collaborative design process where different stakeholders design an urban site using a participatory design tool. Our analysis is based on Schon’s view of design as a process of ‘seeing-moving-seeing’ combined with the concept of choice from Schutz. Analyzing the case provides an understanding of the ways in which ideas ‘move’ a design. We describe the dynamics of collaborative design work where design ideas are moved forward or deliberately blocked from being pursued further. We point to how design decisions are interlinked, making it possible to see how some design decisions are more important than others. Our analysis is narrative in character, but we also present a technique for visualizing the ‘life and death’ of design ideas.
Providing a critical view on user participation in design, disentangling decision making and powe... more Providing a critical view on user participation in design, disentangling decision making and power in design, this book uses fieldwork material from two large participatory design projects: one experimental in the field of urban planning, the other a product development project within health care. Addressing power issues in participatory design is critical to providing a realistic view of the possibilities and limitations of participation. Design is decision-making: during a design process a huge number of decisionstaken before the designers end up with a design result - an artefact or system. All decisions are a choice between possibilities and selecting one of them and making it concrete as a change in an artefact is a demonstration of the capacity to transform, which is a key aspect of power. Participatory designers are committed to empowering users and facilitating a design process where users are able to take part in all types of decisions. This volume explores the challenges for practitioners of participatory design arising from this commitment by asking what participation really means: who should participate and in which parts of a design process; what does it mean to share power with users; how are decisions to be made in a participatory way and what is it that users participate in? The book provides a conceptual framework for understanding these issues as well as a fresh look at participation.
Participatory Design is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technolo... more Participatory Design is a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, tools, environments, businesses, and social institutions more responsive to human needs. A central tenet of Participatory Design is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of things and technologies they use. Participatory Design Conferences have been held every two years since 1990 and have formed an important venue for international discussion of the collaborative, social, and political dimensions of technology innovation and use. The conferences started as a dialogue about user involvement in IT systems development between, on the one hand, Scandinavian scholars and promoters and, on the other hand, Europeans and Americans interested in how the Scandinavian experience could be adopted and extended. Since then, the conference agendas have broadened to address participatory approaches in a variety of other arenas, including communications, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), healthcare, new media, architecture, the arts, and others. PDCs bring together a multidisciplinary and international group of software developers, researchers, social scientists, managers, designers, practitioners, users, cultural workers, activists and citizens who both advocate and adopt distinctively participatory approaches in the development of information and communication artefacts, systems, services and technology. A central concern has always been to understand how collaborative design processes can be driven by the participation of the people affected by the technology designed.
Juhani Iivari’s rich discussion essay about information systems as a design science serves the go... more Juhani Iivari’s rich discussion essay about information systems as a design science serves the goal of triggering a debate about research on information systems (IS). The essay is a reflective piece, and the historic approach to IS research taken by Iivari succeeds in opening up for a discussion about several
on System Development Scandinavian research projects in system development have traditionally put... more on System Development Scandinavian research projects in system development have traditionally put a strong emphasis on user participation as a strategy for increasing working life democracy. The article analyses a few of these projects with respect to this goal. We argue that there has been a development from politics to ethics in system development research, and that the political dimension should be reintroduced. A reorientation of system development strategies aiming at increasing working life democracy can learn from the historical success stories, in particular the combination of global strategy and local action used in the trade union projects in the 60’s. Recent development in technology and working life will, however, introduce new challenges to system development.
In this paper, we report on a participatory design (PD) process with old users. We discuss how we... more In this paper, we report on a participatory design (PD) process with old users. We discuss how we organized and carried out the process so that our users could participate in the mutual learning and co-construction activities on their own terms. When organizing the process we had to take into account the limited capacity for design participation of our users but also build on the capacities they have. The paper describes our PD approach and what we did to facilitate participation from our old users, emphasizing recruiting, timing, continuity, representativity, and immediacy. The paper also discusses which design decisions the users participated in and how they influenced the design result. We analyse how they brought in design possibilities (choices), selected, concretized and evaluated them, and also how the final design result bears traces of their participation.
Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Situated Actions, Workshops and Tutorial - Volume 2, 2018
In this paper1, we explore if and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) challenges Participatory Desig... more In this paper1, we explore if and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) challenges Participatory Design (PD). We base our analysis on the basic characteristics of AI and its subfield Machine Learning and discuss how and what kinds of design decisions users are able to participate in when technology that includes AI is designed. We conclude that AI challenges PD but that classic PD methods can be useful for parts of the design process. However, AI poses new challenges to PD all originating in the fact that AI technologies change unpredictably over time.
COOP 2016: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 23-27 May 2016, Trento, Italy, 2016
The paper explores the question why a design process ends up with a particular result. We analyze... more The paper explores the question why a design process ends up with a particular result. We analyze a collaborative design process where different stakeholders design an urban site using a participatory design tool. Our analysis is based on Schon’s view of design as a process of ‘seeing-moving-seeing’ combined with the concept of choice from Schutz. Analyzing the case provides an understanding of the ways in which ideas ‘move’ a design. We describe the dynamics of collaborative design work where design ideas are moved forward or deliberately blocked from being pursued further. We point to how design decisions are interlinked, making it possible to see how some design decisions are more important than others. Our analysis is narrative in character, but we also present a technique for visualizing the ‘life and death’ of design ideas.
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