Participatory design: the will to succeed

With its 10th biannual anniversary conference, Participatory Design (PD) is leaving its teens and must now be considered ready to join the adult world. In this article we encourage the PD community to think big: PD should engage in large-scale information-systems development and opt for a PD approach applied throughout design and organizational implementation. To pursue this aim we extend the iterative PD prototyping approach by (1) emphasizing PD experiments as transcending traditional prototyping by evaluating fully integrated systems exposed to real work practices; (2) incorporating improvisational change management including anticipated, emergent, and opportunitybased change; and (3) extending initial design and development into a sustained and ongoing stepwise implementation that constitutes an overall technology-driven organizational change. The extended approach is exemplified through a large-scale PD experiment in the Danish healthcare sector. We reflect on our experiences fro...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CRITICAL
• Authors: Dan Shapiro
• Keywords: Applied Computing, CRITICAL 2005, Improvisational Change Management, PD Approach, PD Prototyping Approach