Feature: Participatory Design – and why it's more than UCD

The buzz at the Participatory Design Conference (PDC2006) this month in Trento, Italy, was all about dissemination of methods. In the last few years, this community has watched a number of its more radical ideas for working with users go mainstream. ...Ask people what they do? Involve them in discussions about how things are going to work? Listen to them and use their ideas? Participatory methods have lost their value to shock...

What now seems one fairly obvious way to design technology – with user involvement, not just user modelling and testing - comes from an academic tradition that has long promoted ethnography, futures workshops and user advocacy. Some of that tradition has seeped into general practice as 'contextual enquiry' and so on.

But the philosophy has not. And this was the other theme of conversations both during and surrounding the conference. What is the status of the 'users' you are working with? Are they treated as research subjects providing inspiration for design or are they treated as co-designers?

Patrizia Marti of the Communication Science Department at the University of Siena, Italy, summed up the two participatory approaches prevalent in the design world in her keynote talk: "The evolution of the concept of participation in design".

She juxtaposed the Participatory Design (PD) approach with the UCD approach. People could be an active part of the creative process, or they could be supplying something she called: 'user centred inspiration'. In particular, to illustrate this second group, she pointed to the method of 'cultural probes', developed by Bill Gaver of Goldsmith's College London, which involves people in investigating their lives to supply material to designers as inspiration (see UN story: Cultural Probes offer a Different Human-Centred Design Tool), but not the further engagement typical of PD.

She noted that the origins of PD are deeply intertwined with trade unions' efforts to bring democracy into work domains. So there is a political energy in the philosophy of PD about engaging people in the designs that affect them. This desire to democratise is not apparent in much current UCD work.

Citing an analysis conducted by Liam Bannon of the University of Limerick in 1992, which argued that emphasis was on humans as 'a passive element in a human-machine system', and not 'as an autonomous agent that has the capacity to regulate and coordinate his or her behaviour' (quoted words are extracts from Bannon's 1992 paper "From Human Factors to Human Actors"), she pointed out that end-users are still often considered as Human Factors rather than Human Actors.

She went on to illustrate two projects that her team had been engaged in, under the umbrella of "Palpable Computing": an EU initiative to complement ambient computing with the creation of systems that are capable of being noticed and mentally apprehended (see: http://www.ist-palcom.org/). Both of her projects used PD as a means of meeting particular challenges.

One was the development of educational toys that worked on both an intellectual and physical dimension for use in the swimming pool with young people with Downs Syndrome. Here both care staff and young people had been involved in the production of prototype electronic 'tiles' which floated and could be used for both support and for completing patterns of a more or less challenging nature – programmed by the staff to the needs of individual students.

The other was a 'rolling pin' that worked to communicate with older people suffering from dementia as a way of breaking through the increasing isolation they experience with the condition. When one of a pair of pins is rolled, the other lights up or buzzes. This encourages the person holding the other one to roll their pin too. Given that the old women trying out the pins with relatives or carers had spent many years making pasta with a similar motion in their younger days, there was something particularly elegant about the mechanism.

Marti concluded that in engaging in PD, 'we need to show sensitivity around invading lives, especially given the personal nature of care activities', but even here, where the participant communities were drawn from very vulnerable groups, PD as a concept was possible and productive. During questions one delegate commented that, in fact, in following the patients' lead in developing the technologies, the method echoed the best practice in working with groups with these kinds of special need.

Clearly Marti's work - like much of what was discussed at the rest of the conference - was not subject to the commercial pressures of many UCD projects. The community around the conference is well aware that it is only when PD methods become necessary to improve designs that they find a wider market - their uptake has not been driven by political motivation towards involvement, but by their value in dealing with complex design challenges and innovation. The question is: will the philosophy espoused in these methods ever become seen as essential to the development of good design too?

Associated Link: PDC2006

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