NordiCHI2006: Distributed Participatory Design - Oslo, Norway

This full day workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners who have an interest to overcome the challenges of performing participatory design in distributed design teams, or aim to expand the involvement of external stakeholders during design in distributed teams.

Important dates:
July 27: Deadline for submission of position paper
August 10: Authors of accepted position papers notified
August 14: Deadline early NordiCHI´06 registration
October 14: Date of the workshop

The number of potential stakeholder groups who may be involved during the design process is extensive. Enabling members of these groups to envisage or make sense of design proposals (whether those proposals originate with professional designers or from the users themselves) is an essential element of all participatory approaches to design. Stakeholders can only make informed choices when the proposals being discussed are meaningful to them. Participatory design (PD) is a design approach and philosophy that supports the direct participation of users and other stakeholders in system analysis and design work. This becomes challenging in design projects where stakeholders are fully distributed (both geographically and in regards of competence).

While providing affordable ways for different stakeholders (those who analyze the system and those who design it) to communicate around the artefact is discussed in the CSCW literature, there is no explicit commitment to direct user participation during design of distributed systems.

Nowadays, PD design teams most often are distributed, which stress a need for support and knowledge gathered from design of distributed systems. Given that these fields seem to merge, an interesting question is how may they best benefit from each other? Kensing & Blomberg highlighted this topic already in 1998, nevertheless, it seem to have lost attention since. We stress that whilst most design teams of today are distributed, further dialogue on this topic is of great importance.

OBJECTIVES
This full-day workshop has the following objectives:

* Enhance understanding of the differences and similarities between the fields CSCW and designing with users, and identify how Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) projects may benefit from the two.

* Identify existing tools and techniques and explore potential innovations, which could be applied in DPD projects.

* Explore how users participation may be supported and what challenges their participation make towards the design team and the communication and/or design tools.

Further questions based on the position papers will off course also be of interest to discuss during the workshop.

TARGET AUDIENCE
The target audience of this workshop are researchers and practitioners who have an interest to overcome the challenges of performing participatory design in distributed design teams, or aim to expand the involvement of external stakeholders during design in distributed teams.

ATTENDANCE
All participants must submit their 2 to 4-page position paper no later than July 27, 2006. Please submit your papers to kdson@informatik.umu.se, in WORD or PDF format.

ORGANISERS
Karin Danielsson, Department of Informatics, Umeaa University, Sweden: http://www.informatik.umu.se/~kdson/

Amir M Naghsh, Communications and Computing Research Centre, Faculty of Arts, Computing, Engineering and Science, Sheffield University, England: http://www.shu.ac.uk/schools/cms/paperchaste/amir.htm

Dr. Andy Dearden, Communications and Computing Research Centre, Faculty of Arts, Computing, Engineering and Science, Sheffield University, England: http://teaching.shu.ac.uk/aces/amd/

Associated Link: Workshop description

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