EQUITABLE COLLABORATION IN PARTICIPATORY DESIGN RESEARCH

For some time designers have been evaluating the design process and questioning whether or not this process works to accurately reflect the needs and desires of the people they are designing for. This has led them to build scaffolds within and around the design process, supporting the user as a participant. A research project titled Experimenting with the Co-experience Environment (December 2005) culminated in a ‘scaffold’ designed in resonance with participants. It was a physical environment where people from different disciplines came together to share their experience and contribute their knowledge and understanding to designing. The co-experience participants engaged in storytelling but also in self thinking, creating, proposed designs even though some were not designers, shared ideas that did not require justification…and played.

The research was conducted using action research methodology because it wished to address the three conditions required by this research strategy – the subject matter was situated in a social practice subject to change, the project would proceed through a spiral of cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting in a systematic and documented study, and it was intended that the research evolve as a participatory activity of equitable collaboration (Swann 2002). 

According to Swann, in employing action research methodology, there is often a shortfall in addressing the third condition. Participant involvement is conventionally imbedded in the research as data, analysis or findings and participant contribution is anonymously acknowledged. This paper addresses the issue of equitable collaboration in participatory design research. In recursive action, the participants reflect on their engagement with the research from their multidisciplinary perspectives to collaborate in the research outcomes. Through play and by working in action together they demonstrated the potential of a physical co-experience environment to function as a design scaffold for interdisciplinary design thinking, saying, doing and making.

An exploratory exercise, the outcomes offer insight with regard to the value of equitable collaboration and the findings provide tentative proposals that might influence our approach to engaging participants in design research and experimentation.