Editing Participatory design (section)

==From Community Consultation to Community Design==

Many [[local governments]] require community consultation in any major changes to the built environment. Community involvement in the planning process is almost a standard requirement in most strategic changes. Community involvement in local decision making creates a sense of empowerment. The [[City of Melbourne]] [[Swanston Street]] redevelopment project received over 5000 responses from the public allowing them to participate in the design process by commenting on seven different design options.<ref>The City of Melbourne {{cite web |url=http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/info.cfm?top=192&pa=1323&pg=4460 |title=City of Melbourne - Major projects - Swanston Street redevelopment consultation |access-date=2008-10-17 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090507134929/http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/info.cfm?top=192&pa=1323&pg=4460 |archive-date=2009-05-07 }} ''Have Your Say'' May 14, 2009</ref>  While the [[City of Yarra]] recently held a "Stories in the Street"<ref>Andrea Cook [https://web.archive.org/web/20090731152805/http://www.yarracity.vic.gov.au/Consultation/pdf/Stories%20in%20the%20Street%20Publicity%20Files.pdf] ''Stories in the Street'' May 14, 2009</ref> consultation, to record peoples ideas about the future of Smith Street. It offered participants a variety of mediums to explore their opinions such as mapping, photo surveys and storytelling. Although local councils are taking positive steps towards participatory design as opposed to traditional top down approaches to planning, many communities are moving to take design into their own hands.

[[Portland, Oregon]] [[City Repair Project]]<ref>City Repair {{cite web |url=http://cityrepair.org/about/ |title=City Repair  |access-date=2008-10-17 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100514234908/http://cityrepair.org/about/ |archive-date=2010-05-14 }} "What is City repair" May 13, 2009</ref> is a form of participatory design, which involves the community co-designing problem areas together to make positive changes to their environment. It involves collaborative decision-making and design without traditional involvement from local government or professionals but instead runs on volunteers from the community. The process has created successful projects such as intersection repair,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.streetfilms.org/archives/intersection-repair/|title=Intersection repair|author=Clarence Eckerson Jr|date=2007-05-31|publisher=[[Streetfilms]]}}</ref> which saw a misused intersection develop into a successful community square.

In Malawi, a UNICEF WASH programme trialled participatory design development for latrines in order to ensure that users participate in creating and selecting sanitation technologies that are appropriate and affordable for them. The process provided an opportunity for community members to share their traditional knowledge and skills in partnership with designers and researchers.<ref>Cole, B. (2013) '[https://sanitationlearninghub.org/resource/participatory-design-development-for-sanitation/ Participatory Design Development for Sanitation]', ''Frontiers of CLTS: Innovations and Insights'' 1, Brighton: IDS</ref>

[[P2P Urbanism|Peer-to-peer urbanism]]<ref>[http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/%7eyxk833/P2PURBANISM.pdf "P2P Urbanism", collection of articles]</ref><ref>{{cite web | url=http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Urbanism | title=P2P Urbanism | publisher=P2P Foundation | work=wiki | access-date=July 3, 2015}}</ref> is a form of decentralized, participatory design for urban environments and individual buildings.  It borrows organizational ideas from the [[open-source software movement]], so that knowledge about construction methods and [[urban design]] schemes is freely exchanged.

===In software development===
In the [[English language|English]]-speaking world, the term has a particular currency in the world of [[software development]], especially in circles connected to [[Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility]] (CPSR), who have put on a series of [[Participatory Design Conferences]]. It overlaps with the approach [[extreme programming]] takes to user involvement in design, but (possibly because of its European [[trade union]] origins) the Participatory Design tradition puts more emphasis on the involvement of a broad population of users rather than a small number of user representatives.

Participatory design can be seen as a move of end-users into the world of researchers and developers, whereas [[empathic design]] can be seen as a move of researchers and developers into the world of end-users. There is a very significant differentiation between user-design and [[user-centered design]] in that there is an emancipatory theoretical foundation, and a systems theory bedrock ([[Kristo Ivanov|Ivanov]], 1972, 1995), on which user-design is founded. Indeed, user-centered design is a useful and important construct, but one that suggests that users are taken as centers in the design process, consulting with users heavily, but not allowing users to make the decisions, nor empowering users with the tools that the experts use.  For example, [[Wikipedia]] content is user-designed. Users are given the necessary tools to make their own entries. Wikipedia's underlying [[wiki]] software is based on user-centered design: while users are allowed to propose changes or have input on the design, a smaller and more specialized group decide about features and system design.

Participatory work in software development has historically tended toward two distinct trajectories, one in Scandinavia and northern Europe, and the other in North America.  The Scandinavian and northern European tradition has remained closer to its roots in the labor movement (e.g., Beck, 2002; Bjerknes, Ehn, and Kyng, 1987).  The North American and [[Pacific rim]] tradition has tended to be both broader (e.g., including managers and executives as "stakeholders" in design) and more circumscribed (e.g., design of individual ''features'' as contrasted with the Scandinavian approach to the design of ''entire systems'' and design of the ''work that the system is supposed to support'') (e.g., Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998; Noro and Imada, 1991).  However, some more recent work has tended to combine the two approaches (Bødker et al., 2004; Muller, 2007).