Participatory design
Participatory design is an approach to design that attempts to involve a variety of stakeholders in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable. Participatory design is an approach which is focused on processes and procedures of design and is not a design style. The term is used in a variety of fields, e.g. software design, urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, sustainability, graphic design, industrial design, planning, and health services development, as a way of creating environments that are more satisfactory and appropriate to their inhabitants' and users' practical, cultural, emotional and spiritual needs. It is also one approach to placemaking.
Participatory design has been used in many settings and at various scales. For some, this approach has a political dimension of user empowerment and democratization. This inclusion of external parties in the design process does not excuse designers of their responsibilities. In their article "Participatory Design and Prototyping", Wendy Mackay and Michel Beaudouin-Lafon support this point by stating that " common misconception about participatory design is that designers are expected to abdicate their responsibilities as designers and leave the design to users. This is never the case: designers must always consider what users can and cannot contribute."
Definition
In participatory design, participants are invited to cooperate with designers, researchers and developers during certain parts of a design process. The broader definition of co-design requires the end user's participation not only in evaluating proposals but also in idea generation. Potentially, they participate during several stages of an innovation process: during the initial exploration and problem definition both to help define the problem and to focus ideas for solution, and, during development, they help evaluate proposed solutions.In the broader discourse on collaborative processes, terminology such as co-design, co-creation, and urban co-creation is often debated and differentiated. For example, In "Co-designing for Society", Deborah Szebeko and Lauren Tan list various precursors of co-design, and differentiate co-design from participatory design because co-design "includes all stakeholders of an issue not just the users, throughout the entire process from research to implementation."
Similarly, Maria Gabriela Sanchez and Lois Frankel proposed that "Co-design may be considered... as an interdisciplinary process that involves designers and non-designers in the development of design solutions" and that "the success of the interdisciplinary process depends on the participation of all the stakeholders in the project".
According to Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Stappers "Co-creation is a very broad term with applications ranging from the physical to the metaphysical and from the material to the spiritual", with co-design being a specific instance of co-creation.
Within urban studies, urban co-creation has been proposed to describe participatory processes that are genuinely inclusive, emphasizing the active, bottom-up involvement of residents, communities, and grassroots organizations in shaping urban environments. Bruno Seve argue that urban co-creation encompasses a wide range of practices—including appropriation of space, self-construction, guerrilla gardening, and tactical urbanism—that challenge traditional top-down models. They contend that the term participation alone is ambiguous and insufficient to describe the diversity of collaborative practices and dynamics in urban transformation.
As described by Sanders and Stappers, one could position co-design as a form of human-centered design across two different dimensions. One dimension is the emphasis on research or design, another dimension is how much people are involved. Therefore, there are many forms of co-design, with different degrees of emphasis on research or design and different degrees of stakeholder involvement. For instance, one of the forms of co-design which involves stakeholders strongly early at the front end design process in the creative activities is generative co-design. Generative co-design is increasingly being used to involve different stakeholders, such as patients, care professionals and designers actively in the creative making process to develop health services.
History
From the 1960s onward there was a growing demand for greater consideration of community opinions in major decision-making. In Australia many people believed that they were not being planned 'for' but planned 'at'. A lack of consultation made the planning system seem paternalistic and without proper consideration of how changes to the built environment affected its primary users. In Britain "the idea that the public should participate was first raised in 1965." In 1968 the UK Government set up a Committee to consider Public Participation in Planning, which reported in 1969, recommending little more than that the public should be able to comment on planning proposals. In 1971 the first international conference of the Design Research Society, in Manchester UK, was on 'Design Participation', which took a broad view of emerging practices of participation in design, from radical technology and computer aids in architectural design to inclusive design for disabled users.The level of participation is an important issue. One of the most influential works on citizen participation is the article "A Ladder of Citizen Participation", published by Sherry Arnstein in 1969. In this paper, Arnstein outlines a model consisting of eight levels of participation, ranging from manipulation to citizen control, the latter representing full and genuine participation. At a minimum public workshops and hearings have now been included in almost every planning endeavour. Yet this level of consultation can simply mean information about change without detailed participation. Involvement that 'recognises an active part in plan making' has not always been straightforward to achieve. Participatory design has attempted to create a platform for active participation in the design process, for end users.
History in Scandinavia
In several Scandinavian countries, during the 1960s and 1970s, participatory design was rooted in work with trade unions; its ancestry also includes action research and sociotechnical design. Research projects on user participation in systems development date back to the 1970s. The so-called "collective resource approach" developed strategies and techniques for workers to influence the design and use of computer applications at the workplace: The Norwegian Iron and Metal Workers Union project took a first move from traditional research to working with people, directly changing the role of the union clubs in the project.The Scandinavian projects developed an action research approach, emphasizing active co-operation between researchers and workers of the organization to help improve the latter's work situation. While researchers got their results, the people whom they worked with were equally entitled to get something out of the project. The approach built on people's own experiences, providing for them resources to be able to act in their current situation. The view of organizations as fundamentally harmonious—according to which conflicts in an organization are regarded as pseudo-conflicts or "problems" dissolved by good analysis and increased communication—was rejected in favor of a view of organizations recognizing fundamental "un-dissolvable" conflicts in organizations.
In the Utopia project, the major achievements were the experience-based design methods, developed through the focus on hands-on experiences, emphasizing the need for technical and organizational alternatives.
The parallel Florence project started a long line of Scandinavian research projects in the health sector. In particular, it worked with nurses and developed approaches for nurses to get a voice in the development of work and IT in hospitals. The Florence project put gender on the agenda with its starting point in a highly gendered work environment.
The 1990s led to a number of projects including the AT project and the EureCoop/EuroCode projects.
Later, it became a major challenge to participatory design to embrace the fact that much technology development no longer happens as design of isolated systems in well-defined communities of work.
Co-design
Co-design refers to designated designers working together with the intended product/system users and other stakeholders throughout the process of designing new or improved products and systems. It is especially focused on including the insights, experiences and input from end-users of a product, system or service, with the aim to develop more appropriate, acceptable and satisfactory outcomes. It is often used by designers who recognize the difficulty in properly understanding the usage, societal or cultural scenarios of those for whom the new design is intended.Research suggests that designers create more innovative concepts and ideas when working within a co-design environment with others than they do when creating ideas on their own. Companies also increasingly rely on their user communities to generate new product ideas, marketing them as "user-designed" products to the wider consumer market; consumers who are not actively participating but observe this user-driven approach show a preference for products from such firms over those driven by designers. This preference is attributed to an enhanced identification with firms adopting a user-driven outlook, with consumers feeling empowerment even if being only indirectly involved in the design process, leading to a preference for the firm's products.
Areas of application
In the built environment
Participatory design has many applications in development and changes to the built environment. It has particular currency to planners and architects, in relation to placemaking and community regeneration projects. It potentially offers a more democratic approach to the design process as it involves more than one stakeholder. By incorporating a variety of views there is greater opportunity for successful outcomes.Many local governments require community consultation in any major changes to the built environment. Community involvement in the planning process is almost a standard requirement in most strategic changes. Community involvement in local decision making creates a sense of empowerment. The City of Melbourne Swanston Street redevelopment project received over 5000 responses from the public allowing them to participate in the design process by commenting on seven different design options. While the City of Yarra recently held a "Stories in the Street" consultation, to record peoples ideas about the future of Smith Street. It offered participants a variety of mediums to explore their opinions such as mapping, photo surveys and storytelling. Although local councils are taking positive steps towards participatory design as opposed to traditional top down approaches to planning, many communities are moving to take design into their own hands.