In a nutshell, participatory design (PD) is about designing together, sharing design practices, ideas and decisions towards a positive action, on the ground of (one or more) shared values of the participants. As a working framework, participatory design aims to bring together designers and non-designers, experts from other fields, or simply people that will make use of the design product –participants that that we can hereby call “stakeholders”.
As a design practice, PD finds its roots in ‘70s Scandinavia, and is connected with the democratization of workplaces, and the demand of workers to have their voices heard in the making of their working conditions, largely due to the advent of computers in the productive processes. Similar approaches have emerged in the States during the same period, named collaborative design. These traditions gradually merged under a more recent approach, called co-design.
Of course, when we nowadays discuss about design, we refer to the almost ubiquitous logic that underlies (almost) every human-made structure, be it material or immaterial. PD can be present in the widest range of disciplines, from industrial design, architecture, urban planning & landscaping (an emerging practice in participatory urban design coined as “placemaking”), software design, and policy making (public deliberation and its tools). The participation of non-designers in the design process can thus find its place within the design of objects, to social space, services, networks, interfaces, sequences, and so on…
In the case of participatory game design , all these can be subject to collective decision-making between designers and stakeholders, according to the formers’ intention about which of their design aspects they will negotiate. Adding to the mix a commonly discussed set of (game-) rules , roles , and possibly narratives , we can conclude that participatory game design aims at commonly designed playful experiences or situations.
At the end of the day, and to the extent that participatory game design informs and is informed by practices within participatory art, these playful situations can be regarded not as “finite, portable and commodified” products, as Clare Bishop regards the artistic products of solo artistic intuition, but as constantly evolving contexts for social experience, that rely equally on the designers’ work and the participation of the public.
Key categories and workflow steps
In Participatory design, there are three interrelated and interdependent key categories you are called to work with: People – Values – Resources
| People | Values | Resources |
|---|---|---|
| Expert designers, stakeholders (experts from other fields, future users, people that affect or affected by the design), the relations between them | eg. Trust, inclusiveness, usability, equity, equality, transparency, safety, profit … | Spaces, funds, infrastructure, skills … |
(what you can use, what you and your stakeholders can bring in, what funds you can attract…)|
- In the research stage, designers aim at understanding the values shared among participating stakeholders.
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What resources do you have to support a wide participation?
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Would you consider involving one or more stakeholders that can provide some of these resources?
- In the application phase, designers’ task is to “translate” these values into design features. From colours and shapes of artefacts, to the design of roles, rules, relations, we know that “design is not neutral”: it is subject to, and it communicates cultural norms, ideologies, values etc. Prototyping of course initially falls into this category.
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What resources are you going to need for your prototype?
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In what sort of negotiation can you reach between the available resources and the features you and your stakeholders want to include?
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In the evaluation phase, designers and stakeholders put the design in action, evaluate how the discussed values are being communicated, identify where improvements need to be made, and re-design.
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How are you planning to receive feedback?
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What features are you going to incorporate, and which ones are you discarding? (consider everything discussed, and explain to your stakeholders)
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It is quite possible that more correlated values will emerge from the process: to what extent do you intend to incorporate those?
(an example of correlated values could begin with TRUST:
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Trust your teammates and other players, can lead to issues of safety and privacy,
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Trust the participatory process might require more transparency, honesty and respect in communication, but also issues of fair use, crediting and rewarding your stakeholders for their participation)
Some notes from the field might also be useful for exemplifying things on a practical level:
In the Athenian branch of TiP, we visited and were guided through the participatory design processes of CLOUDS project, an endeavor led by Manolis Levedianos and LUDD in Athens, funded by “START” programme. CLOUDS is an open-source project aimed at the collective creation of a flexible set of basic infrastructure for the accommodation of cultural activities in urban space, on the basis of the key value of Urban Commons (namely, the understanding and treating of urban space as an inclusive and commonly shared resource of all members of the society).
The features of the design were initially proposed by the designers themselves, but they were constantly evaluated, tested and were subjected to deliberation among the invited stakeholders (local communities, independent initiatives, cultural organizations, and others).
Through step-by-step focused meetings, experimentation with the artefacts, reception of feedback and re-design, the process brought together:
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the priorities and activities of each stakeholder (from public exhibitions, screenings, to info-points) that informed add-ons, changes and improvements on the original features.
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hands-on engagement with the prototypes, that informed re-adaptations concerning usability, flexibility, and the fostering applications that were not initially considered (pretty much as a playtesting process).
(the two-fold process largely resonated with the guidelines on Stakeholder engagement)
Towards the last stages, stakeholders were invited to discuss aspects of shared ownership, use, storage, and distribution, by developing a network among themselves, the designed artefacts and public spaces.
Two important meta-notes on the experience on the field:
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In the CLOUDS context, and in the Participatory Design framework in general, the designer work is not limited to the production of objects per se (something also noted above). Moving a step backward, it includes the design of the whole participatory process: ways of interacting, relating, and deciding in common; receiving feedback, applying, evaluating and re-designing; facilitating meetings, encouraging participation, all underline that in the PD framework, participation is equally important, and goes hand-by-hand with the design itself. (for this, see our resources on meetings and participatory decision making)
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Working on the key value of Commons, CLOUDS’ choice was to work (and distribute) the design content in an open-source manner . This is to say, the values designers chose to incorporate, in negotiation with their stakeholders, are not necessarily embedded in the design product in material terms: they can (and should be) manifested in the processes followed, the terms of participation, and in the project’s afterlife.
To conclude by repetition and summing up, anything human-made can be considered a product of design. In my personal view, what you cannot really do is to design a community itself. Historically, any attempt of the like flirted with totalitarian governmental practice. But what you can do is to facilitate a community, foster the relations within it, or trigger the making of one, by highlighting and accommodating the shared values of the people you reach out in order to participate in the process.