Building a Room of Our Own: The Cooperative Design of Web-based Group Project Support for an Educational Comminity

Abstract

This paper reports on a system development project to facilitate group work in an educational setting. Our main goal was to create a prototype of a web-based collaboration tool to support student project teams. We also sought to explore the relevance of participatory design methodology in an educational community setting and to reflect on learning and applying participatory design methods. We found that while participatory design methods are applicable to this context, they needed to be adapted to address the particular needs and motivations of a large, diverse user group, with a high turnover in membership. We worked with a small surrogate group, focusing on fostering a mutually rewarding relationship with these users. Our position as both designers and users also offered an opportunity to reflect on the challenges and advantages that the merging of these roles can bring to participatory design.