Participatory design

Participatory design is an approach in which people affected by a design actively shape its development. It treats their experience and knowledge as resources for design decisions.

Co-design: A collaborative design practice in which designers and other participants jointly create solutions. Co-design names the collaborative activity at the heart of participatory design.
User-centered design: A design approach that bases decisions on research into users’ needs, tasks, and contexts. It shares a focus on users but does not necessarily give them decision-making power.
Scandinavian participatory design: The labor-oriented design tradition developed in Scandinavia through collaborations among workers, unions, and researchers. This tradition established influential principles and methods for involving workers in technology design.
Inclusive design: A design approach that seeks to make products and services usable by people with diverse abilities and circumstances. Participation can bring excluded groups’ needs into decisions rather than treating them as afterthoughts.
Participatory action research: A research approach in which participants and researchers jointly investigate problems and act on findings. It provides a model for combining participant knowledge, inquiry, and change.
Human-computer interaction: The study and design of interactions between people and computing systems. Participatory design became a prominent approach within this broader design and research field.
Kristen Nygaard: A Norwegian computer scientist who co-created the programming language Simula and advanced participatory approaches to computing. His work linked computer technology with workers’ influence over its design.
Community informatics: The study and practice of using information and communication technologies to support communities. Community projects use participatory methods to shape technologies around local priorities.
Contextual inquiry: A user-research method that studies people performing real tasks in their usual settings. Observing work in context helps participants and designers ground design decisions in practice.
Situated knowledge: Knowledge shaped by the specific social, material, and historical position from which it is produced. Participants contribute knowledge grounded in the situations where a design will be used.

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