Participatory Design in a Commercial Context - a conceptual framework

Authors

  • Finn Kensing

Keywords:

Context, participatory design, IT-design practice

Abstract

The paper addresses various challenges met by IT-design practitioners, who pursue Participatory Design (PD) agendas and approaches in projects in a commercial context. These challenges vary of course, but they are different from the challenges met in PD-projects that are mainly carried out for research purposes. A conceptual framework is proposed for managing relationships and designing IT-applications in order to meet the needs of specific organizations. The framework consists of six contexts and their interrelations, highlights factors of each context that need to be taken into account, and gives practical recommendations for how to make use of the framework. The purpose is to be more concrete and operational about 'context' than it is often the case in the literature. Thus the paper tears apart some of the conflation of denotations and connotations in the term 'context' which is often used as a catch-all, for what is difficult to specify. The main argument of the paper is that the proposed framework is simple enough to be used as a cognitive tool for IT-design practitioners and rich enough to help them focus on and move between issues that have proven crucial in many "real life" projects.

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Published

2000-01-01