Participatory Design

Participatory design is a design philosophy for computer systems for the workplace, which originated in Scandanavia in the 1980s. We'll first discuss it in its original form, and then see what lessons there are that can be generalized to other situations.

Design ideals (as listed by Greenbaum and Kyng):

• computer systems for the workplace need to be designed with full participation from the users
• computer systems should enhance workplace skills rather than degrading or rationalizing them
• computer systems are tools and should be under the control of the people using them. They should support work activities, not make them more rigid or rationalized
• a goal should be to increase the quality of results, not just quantity
• the design process is a political one and inherently involves conflicts; these should be recognized and dealt with
• we should focus on how computers will be used, how they will fit into the work

Users as competent practitioners, engaged in work -- contrast with a traditional system designer's view of users as people sitting in front of a screen. (Liam Bannon's paper, for example, is called "From Human Factors to Human Actors".)

User issues dominate much computer management and system development literature. The participatory design advocates typically set themselves apart from this -- for them, the question is not how to integrate the user into the system development process, but rather is creating new ways for users and designers to work together.

Work practice:

• need for designers to take work practice seriously
• human actors vs. human factors
• work tasks must be seen within their context
• work is fundamentally social, involving extensive cooperation and communiction

Designing for work practice:

• mutual learning between users and designers
• use of tools in the design process that are familiar to the users
• evisionment of future work situations
• start design process in the practice of the users

The rationalistic tradition (from Winograd and Flores):

• characterize the situation in terms of identifiable objects with well-defined properties
• find general rules that apply to situations in terms of those objects and properties
• apply the rules logically to the situation, drawing conclusions about what should be done

Why do computer systems often reduce the need for skilled and experienced workers?

• rationalistic world view tends to make designers view the application from the top of the organization
• ... view the organization as a structure whose important aspects can be and should be formally described
• express jobs as algorithms
• view people and computers as information processing systems; the designer's job is to distribute the workload among them

Co-determination Laws

Kristen Nygaard was heavily involved in projects by unions and consultants to develop strategies for dealing with new technology, beginning with collaboration with the Norgwegian Metal Worker's Union. In these projects, the participants started out learning existing system analysis techniques and tools, but decided new ones should be developed instead.

see discussion on page 51 of Ehn's paper "Scandanavian Design: On Participation and Skill"

DEMOS project in Sweden -- example of design of a planning system for locomotive engine repair shop

UTOPIA project -- computer systems for graphic designers

Some Questions:

• How well do these ideas apply in countries such as the US with quite different political climates?
• The participatory design philosophy seems focussed mainly on introducing new custom-designed systems into an existing workplace. How do these ideas apply to developing new products that are sold on the open market?

User-Centered Design

Donald Norman and Stephen Draper, User Centered System Design: one of the first major books to place users in the foreground ... designing for people, not for technology

some principles: identification of what the user's needs are; prototyping; early and regular user testing (contrast with user participation ...)