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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Participatory design | 3/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:02:48.714500+00:00 | kb-cron |
Public interest design is a design movement, extending to architecture, with the main aim of structuring design around the needs of the community. At the core of its application is participatory design. Through allowing individuals to have a say in the process of design of their own surrounding built environment, design can become proactive and tailored towards addressing wider social issues facing that community. Public interest design is meant to reshape conventional modern architectural practice. Instead of having each construction project solely meet the needs of the individual, public interest design addresses wider social issues at their core. This shift in architectural practice is a structural and systemic one, allowing design to serve communities responsibly. Solutions to social issues can be addressed in a long-term manner through such design, serving the public, and involving it directly in the process through participatory design. The built environment can become the very reason for social and community issues to arise if not executed properly and responsibly. Conventional architectural practice often does cause such problems since only the paying client has a say in the design process. Portland, Oregon City Repair Project was a form of participatory design involving the community co-designing problem areas together to make positive changes to their environment. It involved collaborative decision-making and design without traditional involvement from local government or professionals but instead run on volunteers from the community. The process has created successful projects such as intersection repair, 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.
=== In software development === In the 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 (Ivanov, 1972, 1995), on which user-design is founded. 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 other has tended to combine the two approaches (Bødker et al., 2004; Muller, 2007).