Participatory Design: Less Design, More Participating

Ten to fifteen years ago, participatory design was viewed as the next step in better design and another way to involve customers and users in the process. It was lauded as a way to take the people who will be the consumers of products, provide them with lots of ‘building blocks’ and have them create their ideal
product. It yielded great artifacts and let the team pat themselves on the back and say that they were including the customer in the design process more than
anyone else.

But what happened was we quickly realized that customers are actually dreadful designers. There are several reasons for this. First, customers generally only know their world and therefore their palatte of ideas and technologies is limited to what they have already seen or heard. Second, they think too granularly (“how do I do this task better”) and not about the bigger picture. The customer’s “designs” are pretty poor and most design teams would tell you that the end result doesn’t help much with creating an innovative, new to the world product. Once these realizations sank in, participatory design activities fell out of favor with design teams even though it was fun to say that your customers helped you to design the latest product.

Don’t look now, but it’s starting to come back around. While I am a little nervous we’ll see people repeating the same realization about customer design abilities, the good news is that I have seen a lot of improvements to this practice. While it includes similar activities as before (boxes, Velcro®, felt and markers used to build an ideal device with), design researchers are now doing a better job of focusing on two areas: consumer stimulus-response and consumer storytelling. Some people in the past considered these aspects, but it’s becoming much more common now. There is now less emphasis being placed on the actual design output from the participant(thankfully) and more on their reactions, responses and stories they tell through the process. People who are using it most effectively recognize that participatory design is a research method, not a design method. It results in data, direction and information – not design. Undoubtedly there have been instances when a customer comes up with a great design idea, but that should be considered a rare occurrence and not something that should be expected. Good participatory design requires good moderation. The effort of building an ideal product can unlock insight and information from consumers that a good interviewer can help to extract.

It’s really not participatory design any more than a good interview is but since we ask participants to design something (a collage, a foam model) we call it design. I’m all for it and use it myself when appropriate, but for those new to this activity, remember your customers are NOT designers. Go into it with a
clear view that it is primarily a research method and you will gain some useful insights.