[Sigia-l] Participatory Design - resources

[A. Simon Mielniczuk]

Had the great pleasure of being introducted to participatory design by
Andrew Clement at the Faculty of Information Studies, Univ. of Toronto. He's
published on this topic for some time and is active in the Participatory
Design conferences.

For those interested in the 'elevator ride' intro to PD, please view:

www.cpsr.org/issues/pd/introInfo
www.kmdi.org/kmd1001F/clement.ppt

The prescriptive part of your request is more difficult.
User/employee/customer participation, whether in system design or in more
lofty regions of decision making is a policy and power decision. How much
participation is the project sponsor willing to accept? How much does the
company have to accept, that is, can the participants compel a certain
direction? There is another dimension related to the previous two questions.
What is the willingness and motivation for participants to engage in the
project?

In my view, the system designer applying PD should have a sense of the
answers before attempting participatory design. There is a strong value base
in participatory design which is reflected not only in its approach but in
methods and techniques. Application of these in an environment which is
hostile to that value base is almost certain to generate controversy and
opposition.

Central to all of this is the ability of the design lead to work with both
sponsors and participants, to observe work situations and to elicit and
integrate practices, working assumptions, and potentially controversial
'undiscussables' into the design. And do all of these within the demands of
changing business conditions while producing results.


_______________________________________
A. Simon Mielniczuk - Solutions Architect
ITS Co-operative Inc.
416.828.2118 / www.itscooperative.com
ITS blog:
http://www.itscooperative.com/community/blogs/its_weblog/default.aspx
personal blog:
http://www.itscooperative.com/community/blogs/asm/default.aspx
 

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On Behalf
Of Yogesh Tadwalkar
Sent: May 16, 2006 11:29 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Participatory Design - resources

Hi,

What books, papers, publications and websites would you recommend if one has
to know more about participatory design....