Participatory Design

Overview

What happens when the people affected by a design help create it, rather than only react to it afterward?

An approach — also called cooperative design, co-design, or co-creation — that involves stakeholders directly in the design process itself, from research through implementation, rather than studying them up front and testing them only at the end. It goes further than Know Your Customers and Customer-Centered Design‘s observe-and-validate model: stakeholders don’t just supply information the design team interprets, they help generate the design’s ideas directly. “Stakeholder” is also broader than “customer” here — a co-design process can include anyone with a stake in the outcome (staff, community members, domain experts), not only the people who’ll use the finished product.

It goes further than Know Your Customers and Customer-Centered Design‘s observe-and-validate model: stakeholders don’t just supply information the design team interprets, they help generate the design’s ideas directly.

Measure how real the participation actually is

Not every process that puts a stakeholder in the room counts as genuine participation. Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 “Ladder of Citizen Participation” lays out eight rungs, from manipulation (participation as decoration on a decision already made) up through informing, consultation, and placation, to partnership, delegated power, and finally citizen control (participants hold the actual decision-making authority). The ladder is a useful self-check for any co-design process: being asked for input is not the same as being placated, and being placated is not the same as sharing power over the outcome.

The ladder is a useful self-check for any co-design process: being asked for input is not the same as being placated, and being placated is not the same as sharing power over the outcome.

Two traditions of participatory design

Participatory design splits into two traditions with different assumptions. The original tradition treats organizational conflicts of interest (e.g., between management and workers) as real and worth designing around, not as misunderstandings solvable by better communication — a more adversarial starting assumption than most customer-centered design literature makes. A second, later tradition, organized around Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, is broader in whom it includes (managers and executives alongside workers) but narrower in scope (individual feature design rather than whole work-process redesign).

Treat stakeholder knowledge as equal to the design team’s

Three principles distinguish participatory design from simply “getting user feedback”:

• Stakeholders’ knowledge counts as much as the team’s. A worker’s knowledge of how a task actually gets done is treated as being just as valid as a designer’s or engineer’s professional knowledge, not as raw material the professionals alone get to interpret.
• Designers don’t abdicate responsibility. Designers still decide what to build; the point is to widen whose input shapes that decision, not to hand the decision to a vote. Involving stakeholders in idea generation is compatible with the design team still owning the final call.
• The designer becomes a facilitator, not a sole author. The work shifts toward structuring a process other people can meaningfully contribute to — running workshops, choosing exercises, synthesizing what comes out of them — rather than designing in isolation and presenting a finished result for reaction. The explicit aim is to reduce the power imbalance between “the designer” and “the user.”

The explicit aim is to reduce the power imbalance between “the designer” and “the user.”

Run generative co-design activities

Where Customer Research Methods mostly observes or asks, participatory design runs sessions where stakeholders actively make things: generative co-design workshops put a deliberately diverse group of stakeholders through creative-making exercises (sketching, prototyping, building with simple materials) to generate design ideas directly, rather than having the design team infer ideas from interview transcripts alone. Recruiting for this kind of workshop benefits from deliberately sampling across knowledge/experience levels rather than convenience sampling, so the group’s range of perspectives isn’t accidentally narrow.

The same participatory stance extends to the research itself, not just the design decisions that follow it: stakeholders can help shape what questions get asked and how findings get interpreted, following the participatory action research tradition, rather than being purely a data source for a separately-run research process.

Watch for barriers to real participation

Four recurring obstacles keep participatory intentions from surviving contact with a real project:

• Doubt that non-designers can be creative. Treating creativity as a specialist skill undercuts the whole premise; in practice, creative contribution takes many forms beyond formal design training.
• Hierarchies that resist losing control. Organizations built around centralized decision-making — especially where profit or status depends on that control — have a structural reason to resist actually sharing design authority, even while paying lip service to “getting user input.”
• Time and cost. Genuine participation takes real funding, coordination, and stakeholder time; under budget or schedule pressure, projects that start out participatory tend to revert to a design team simply deciding and presenting, since that’s cheaper and faster.
• Diverging priorities. A design team may prioritize aesthetics where stakeholders prioritize functionality or affordability (or vice versa). Resolving this well means finding solutions that satisfy both — e.g. a low-cost material that’s still visually acceptable — rather than one side’s priority quietly winning by default.

Related Concepts

Processes

• Customer-Centered Design
• Know Your Customers
• Design-Centering Styles
• Card Sorting
• Customer Research Methods

Further reading

Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka’s edited collection Participatory Design: Principles and Practices (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993, ISBN 978-0805809510 — commercially published, no stated open license) gathers the field’s foundational papers from both the original, more adversarial tradition and the CPSR-organized later tradition this page’s Two traditions section names, with practitioner-written case studies of specific participatory methods this page doesn’t cover in that depth.

Sources

Participatory Design (Wikipedia) (CC BY-SA) is this page’s source — Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation, the two traditions’ differing scope and assumptions about conflict, the three principles distinguishing participatory design from ordinary feedback-gathering, and the four barriers to genuine participation.