Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding: Enriching Participatory Design with Informed Participation

Abstract

Historically, participatory design (PD) has focused on system development at design time by bringing developers and users together to envision contexts of use. But despite the best efforts at design time, systems need to evolve at use time to fit new needs, account for changing tasks, and incorporate new technologies. In this paper, we argue that systems should be designed as seeds that are able to evolve. The evolutionary growth of the seed is driven by informed participation, in which active users explore complex design problems and, in the process, create new information. When evolutionary growth can no longer proceed efficiently, a reseeding phase is required to organize, formalize, and generalize information so that it may support a new period of evolutionary growth. Informed participation requires social changes as well as new interactive systems that provide the opportunity and resources for social debate and discussion rather than merely delivering predigested information to users. This paper presents key issues for designing new media in support of informed participation. These issues have been explored through several applications of the DynaSites system in contexts including collaborative design and courses -as~eeds.