Participatory design is a discipline of design practices based on complete inclusion of the user or intended work community in the design of their tools and processes. Participatory design (PD) differs from other approaches (such as joint application design, or JAD) in that the users are more than stakeholders in the design and development process - they share responsibility with the developers for the quality and performance of the delivered system. They also share much more broadly in the development process itself, by participating with developers and as designers themselves (a process sometimes referred to as "co-development"). PD is more a philosophy of total user involvement with the systems they will eventually use in their roles as producers of value for the organization. This philosophy in practice extends far beyond merely design workshops and JAD sessions - it becomes the way of doing business for development of all systems.

Participatory design originated in Scandinavia in the 1980’s as an outgrowth of the democratic philosophy of work fostered in Northern Europe. Since PD is so strongly user-centered, it represents a major philosophical change from the consulting model of system design favored by U.S. corporations. One of the tenets of PD is that system workers should be given better tools for their work instead of having their work mechanized. Another is that the user’s perceptions about technology in their work are as significant as the technical requirements for the technology. PD is oriented toward improving social factors in the workplace, which is considered a major purpose of design in Scandinavia. As a design approach, it has been favorably received in Europe, and has been used in numerous projects reported in international journals. Participatory design has evolved over time from a worker-centered intervention to a more integrated system design approach, incorporating a wider range of team members such as analysts, developers, and managers.

Participatory design showed up later in the United States, as an outgrowth of user-centered system design practices facilitated by human factors practitioners. The North American PD approach is more focused on integrating users into the design process and less oriented toward workplace issue resolution or organizational design. PD is considered different from JAD in its allowing users to share responsibility for design with the project and development teams.

Karen Holtzblatt developed the process of Contextual Design, a methodology for engaging user participation in design of their systems and tasks by fully involving their work experience. By interviewing the users in the context of their work environment, and treating the users as the experts in the work processes to be designed, a contextual view of the system is developed. This substantially differs from traditional requirements approaches, as it places much of the control for information collection in the hands of the users. Contextual inquiry is typically conducted as a set of processes adapted to the environment, and does not consist of specific steps. Traditional design methods, such as prototyping and diagramming, can be integrated into a contextual inquiry approach. Contextual Design has grown into a useful methodology with applications throughout the development lifecycle, and has achieved fairly regular use among practitioners.

Various product companies ranging from consumer products (Thomson-RCA) to software (Microsoft) and data services (LEXIS-NEXIS) engage users in interactive methods derived from PD. Design consulting firms such as Fitch actively use PD-derived tools as a primary design approach with clients and their users.

Although some specific techniques and user interaction approaches are associated with participatory design, it has become more a way of organizing the people involved with democratic problem solving and design. It is a way of bringing together people in the "shared space" of collaboration as described by Schrage, where the shared space is the workshop or other environment created by the design team to support creative collaboration in the design by all participants. It is shared because all the participants have equal access, not just professional designers. Participatory design advocates have traditionally resisted imposing the structure and strict methodology associated with JAD and other system-oriented approaches. The shared space concept is typical of PD approaches, allowing for the group to create its own design processes in a shared model of design.

A strong concern for the social dimensions is found throughout discussions in the PD community. As noted in the Muller and Kuhn letter in the annotated bibliography, social issues and organizational politics are found in all information systems implementations. PD is unique among the system design orientations in making the social impacts and political assumptions explicit. By understanding the social nature of work, and communicating the agendas, values, and goals of all stakeholders in an implementation, PD provides the opportunity for all concerned to make informed choices, and to evaluate the impact of design decisions on the future of the workplace. In other words, PD takes the approach that the social design of work for users is at least as important as management goals.

Participatory approaches in design are based on the assumptions of democratic principles, which are often considered by management to be irrelevant in the workplace. Although workplace democracy is established in the social systems of northern European countries, in the birthplace of modern democracy, the United States, the workplace is one of the last venues with any democratic orientation. This ironic situation has become acknowledged in the PD community, and has led to a movement within PD to arrange for greater ties to trade unions in the US, which is a perhaps more political step toward activism. The close involvement of PD practice with user groups has always been a mainstay of the PD approach, but inroads into both management and unions are considered necessary to bring about an environment conducive to open participation.

One of the key factors constraining the acceptance of PD in North American organizations is its orientation toward balancing power relationships in favor of system users, as opposed to "owners" or managers. PD is intended to enable users in gaining responsibility for their own work practices, and in the American tradition this approach can be considered quite radical. So we find in our development organizations the acceptance of some of the PD methods as participation processes designed to engage stakeholders in defining and elaborating a system design. What we don’t find is the original intent of PD in its emancipatory orientation to empower users in designing humane work processes within the context of a system design.

Currently there are few PD processes designed to specifically involve management participants - the PD orientation, and also JAD and other facilitated methods, typically endorse the absence of management participants. One recent study (Kensing, 1996), studied the integration of PD processes with project management. With a process termed MUST (a Danish acronym for a process engaging PD methods for initial analysis and design), Kensing studied the use of PD processes in business reengineering and project management. Kensing recommends integrating IT professionals, including project management and the users in a design team. He also recommends using a steering committee with management representatives from both IT and the user organizations. This is one of the few PD approaches that provides an inclusive orientation toward management, although the participation is somewhat isolated from the design decisions. Given the political nature of PD in most organizations, this separation is probably useful and necessary. Significant inclusion of managers and users in the same sessions restricts the opportunities for exploring possible alternatives, since the power relationships inherent in the management-subordinate situation disallow consideration of freely specified alternatives.

Other orientations toward design participation can be found outside of the PD and the systems literature. Another approach toward integration of management and users in full participation is found through interactive management. Coming from a more management-oriented tradition than PD, interactive management provides processes in its inclusiveness that enable the full participation of the diversity of stakeholders in an effort. Interactive management processes are not typically oriented toward the detailed levels of system design as in PD, but are more engaged in front-end analysis and decision making for complex social systems, work practices, and organizational design.

Interactive management (IM) emerged conceptually from work by Warfield (1976) and Christakis (1973), and has been developed by them in collaboration with other researchers. IM supports a democratic approach toward decision making, and provides structures within which stakeholders can deeply engage all elements of significant design problems. It is similar to PD in its use of multiple group process and decision-making methods as a means of obtained free and unbiased contributions to a group-based solution. It differs from PD in several ways, particularly in its more cognitive orientation toward design, in which participants examine all significant factors affecting their design space in the decision process. PD tends to use highly-simplified exercises designed to remove the technical factors inherent in a systems design, as a way to reduce the power bias inherent when non-technical users interact with information systems professionals.

However, lessons from the IM discipline have not typically been applied in the PD orientation - PD’s traditions maintain a strong political orientation that prevents a useful integration of management participation. The disciplined decision analysis and software tools (e.g., CogniScope) used in IM have also not been used in PD processes, even in North America. The cognitive orientation toward explicit social systems and work practice design from IM has also not emerged within the PD literature, and it might not, given PD’s fundamental tenets of situated work practice and the ineffectiveness of planning in work practice (Suchman, 1987).

Also, the literature of Interactive Management does not reveal influence from the European PD tradition, and in many ways IM could benefit from PD methods as well. The PD-derived methods for design and implementation of detailed work processes and information systems have not been carried over into IM, and these workshop and team approaches have proven value and validity in mixed-stakeholder participation. PD’s inherent orientation toward social value systems in design might provide a path for a values foundation in IM. Finally, PD’s philosophy of situated work practice, resting on the basic tenets of tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1966), might balance IM’s apparently "objectivist" orientation by enabling evaluation of significant hidden factors and cultural context inherent in group communications and the design of social and work systems.

References:

Banathy, B. (1996). Designing social systems in a changing world, Plenum Press, New York.

Christakis, A.N. and Schearer, W.L. (1997). Collaboration through communicative action: Resolving the systems dilemma through the Cogniscope system approach. Paoli, Penn.: CWA, Ltd.

Warfield, J.N. and Cardenas, R. (1994). A handbook of Interactive Management, Iowa State University Press, Ames, Iowa.