Participatory design: one step back or two steps forward?
Abstract
Several authors are pointing to the drift in focus from participation as the means to a political agenda to participation as a means to a smooth development and implementation, or sometimes as an end in itself. Other authors are arguing that participatory design (PD) should move forward to include new trends within IS. The aim of this paper is to present a snapshot of where PD stands today, in order to offer suggestions on where we need to be tomorrow. The concluding remarks from the discussion is that there are a number of new trends such as open innovation and distributed participation that have a great deal to gain from the knowledge and experience within the participatory design community. At the same time these new trends could constitute new research fields that would broaden the PD environment and result in interesting findings as exiting methods and theories are applied and tested in new contexts. Hence, the only way to move one step back seems to be to take two steps forward.
