Challenges and Opportunities in
Contemporary Participatory Design
Toni Robertson, Jesper Simonsen
At the core of Participatory Design is the direct involvement of
people in the co-design of tools, products, environments, busi-
nesses, and social institutions. In particular, Participatory Design
has developed a diverse collection of principles and practices to
encourage and support this direct involvement. Many of the design
tools and techniques generated to further this process have become
standard practice for the design and development of information
and communications technologies and increasingly other kinds of
products and services. These design tools and techniques include
various kinds of design workshops in which participants collabora-
tively envision future practices and products; scenarios, personas
and related tools that enable people to represent their own activities
to others (rather than having others do this for them); various forms
of mock-ups, prototypes and enactment of current and future activ-
ities used to coordinate the design process; and iterative prototyp-
ing so that participants can interrogate developing designs and
ground their design conversations in the desired outcomes of the
design process and the context in which these will be used.1 Partici-
patory Design has also pioneered and developed some of the basic
research questions, methods, and agendas that have recently been
taken up by design research in more traditional design environ-
ments (e.g., innovation through participation).2

Increasingly, participatory designers have sought to develop
processes to enable active stakeholder participation in the design of
the tools, environments, businesses, and social institutions in which
these information and communication technologies are embedded.
These widened contexts have been reflected in the themes of recent
Participatory Design conferences and in the substantive focus of the
research presented in them.
Participatory Design: A Brief Overview
The beginnings of contemporary Participatory Design lie primarily
1 Jesper Simonsen and Toni Robertson,
eds., Routledge International Handbook
in the restless and exhilarating days of the various social, political
of Participatory Design (London:
and civil rights movements the 1960s and 1970s. People in many
Routledge, 2012).
western societies demanded an increased say in the decisions that
2 Jesper Simonsen et al., eds.,
affected many different aspects of their lives. Some designers and
Design Research: Synergies from
design researchers participated very directly in these activities and
Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London:
Routledge, 2010).
© 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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some also responded by investigating how they might relate to
their own practices. Community arts projects were common; archi-
tects and planners got involved in the participatory planning of
community housing; and a major conference sponsored by the
Design Research Society and held in Manchester took Design Partic-
ipation as its theme.3

At this time too, and by no means unrelated, what we now
call the Participatory Design of information technology was pio-
neered in Europe and especially in Scandinavia as part of what later
became known as the workplace democracy movement. Writing of
this early work, Morten Kyng observed that “As part of the trans-
formation of the workplace, working conditions for many end users
have changed dramatically, and not always for the better.”4 Partici-
patory Design researchers and Scandinavian trade unions initiated
a range of collective activities to question existing approaches to the
computerization of the workplace, to create visions of different
kinds of future workplaces and practices and to design the new
computer based systems that would shape them. The active
involvement of those who would use these new technologies was
central to and defining of these activities. The aims were to support
users and enable them to use and enhance their skills while avoid-
ing any unnecessary or negative constraints or automation of their
work tasks. New ways of designing were needed that relied on new
forms of cooperation between end users and professional system
developers. This essential, emancipatory commitment, the motiva-
tion behind it, and the context from which it emerged have driven
the development of Participatory Design ever since.

The international Participatory Design research community
gathers at the biennial Participatory Design Conferences (PDCs).
This conference series started as a dialogue about user involvement
in IT systems development between Scandinavian scholars and
promoters, on the one hand, and Europeans and Americans inter-
ested in how the Scandinavian experience might be adopted and
expanded on the other. The first PDC was held in Seattle in 1990,
and the conferences have been held every other year since.5 They
continue to provide an important venue for international discus-
sion of the collaborative, social, ethical, and political dimensions of
design. Today, Participatory Design is a well-established area of
3 Nigel Cross, Design Participation
research and an important practice across many design disciplines.
(London: Academy Editions, 1972).

These days, user participation within information and com-
4 Morten Kyng, “Designing for a Dollar a
munication technology design is widely accepted and practiced
Day,” in CSCW ’88, Proceedings of the
through the use of iterative design techniques such as mock-ups
Conference on Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work (New York: ACM Press,
and prototyping. User participation is central to the development of
1988), 178-88.
understandings and practices that are defining current trends in,
5 All Participatory Design Conference
for example, design thinking and user-driven innovation. But the
proceedings from 1990 are available
meaning of participation does not reduce to ‘involvement,’ and Par-
from http://pdcproceedings.org
ticipatory Design is not the same as ‘user-centered design;’ though
(1990-2002 as free downloads and
from 2004 via the ACM Digital Library).
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the two can have much in common and some design tools and tech-
niques are used in both. While many areas of design now pay at
least lip service to people’s participation, the question of how par-
ticipation is being negotiated and defined (and by whom) is funda-
mental to distinguishing Participatory Design from the more
common user-centered approaches. Participatory Design projects
are always driven by ongoing and systematic reflection on how to
involve users as full partners in design and how this involvement
can unfold throughout the design process. The basic motivation
remains democratic and emancipatory: Active participation needs
to define Participatory Design because if we are to design the
futures we wish to live, then those whose futures are affected must
actively participate in the design process. This is the reason why
Participatory Design continues to develop processes, tools, and
methods that can enable active and engaged participation in design
activities, wherever and whenever they occur.

“Participation” in Participatory Design means to investigate,
reflect upon, understand, establish, develop, and support mutual
learning processes as they unfold between participants in collective
“reflection-in-action” during the design process. Designers strive to
learn about the practices and contexts of those who will use their
designs, while end-users and other participants in the process strive
to learn about possible technological options. Mutual learning
throughout the process provides al participants with increased
knowledge and understandings: Potential users about what is
being designed; designers about people and their practices; and al
participants about the design process, its outcomes and how both
can influence the ways we live and the choices we can make.

Participatory Design has been defined by a strong commit-
ment to understanding practice, guided by the recognition that
designing the technologies people use in their everyday activities
shapes, in crucial ways, how those activities might be done. Under-
standings of practice, gained through various forms of ethno-
graphic inquiry, are exploited as alternatives to the formal diagrams
and heavily abstracted work flow processes that define traditional
approaches to technology design. Practice plays a central epistemo-
logical role in Participatory Design that complements its rejection
of technology-driven formalisms and rationalist models of both
work and design, along with their focus on individual work tasks.
The focus on practice recognizes the role of everyday practical
action in shaping the worlds in which we live. Most importantly,
practice is understood as a social activity; it is the community that
6 Lucy Suchman and Randall Trigg,
defines a given domain of work and what it means to accomplish
“Understanding Practice: Video as a
it successfully.6
Medium for Reflection and Design,” in

One of the greatest challenges in Participatory Design proj-
Design At Work: Cooperative Design of
ects is to ensure that they continue long enough through the devel-
Computer Systems, Joan Greenbaum
opment and implementation of new products and situations to
and Morten Kyng eds. (Chichester, UK:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991).
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fully explore the mutual learning and to both reflect on and other-
wise evaluate the process and its outcomes. This has become more
difficult to manage with the increasing availability of off-the-shelf
products and the rise of domestic, mobile, and embedded technolo-
gies. Systems and applications are rarely developed from scratch. It
is more usual for generic components to be purchased and then
configured within specific settings. Participatory designers have
needed to develop new design processes, tools and techniques to
enable mutual learning, design reflection and evaluation in projects
where individual components are configured into useful devices
and services.7
7 Ellen Balka et al., “Reconfiguring Critical

Practices change over time, often in response to opportuni-
Computing in an Era of Configurability,”
ties provided by new technologies and to developing protocols
in Proceedings of the Fourth Decennial
about their use. How particular technologies are used and the roles
Conference on Critical Computing (New
York: ACM Press, 2005), 79-88.
they play are shaped by the situations in which they are embedded.
8 Randall Trigg and Susanne Bødker, “From
Many of those involved in Participatory Design recognize that
Implementation to Design: Tailoring
design is completed in use. During the 1990s, this recognition
and the Emergence of Systemisation in
resulted in a marked interest in the tailor-ability of systems, so that
CSCW”. In CSCW ‘ 94, Proceedings of
users could adapt them to suit their needs after implementation.8
the Conference on Computer-Supported
Cooperative Work (New York: ACM Press,

As a result, Participatory Design research and practice
1994), 45-54; Toni Robertson “Shoppers
includes studies of actual technology use and ongoing reconfigura-
and Tailors: Participative Practices in
tions of particular settings and practices. The ongoing design itera-
Small Australian Design Companies,”
tions so central to Participatory Design practice can include
Computer Supported Cooperative Work:
evaluations of implemented technologies after they have been used
The Journal of Collaborative Computing
for a period of time and can also be included as part of ongoing
7, 2-3 (1998): 205-21.
9 Monika Büscher et al., “Ways
commercial projects.9 Exploring practices that involve the use of
of Grounding Imagination,” in
actual technologies of ers Participatory Design practitioners valu-
Proceedings of the 8th Participatory
able opportunities to understand the fundamental ways in which
Design Conference: Artful Integration:
these, too, rely on the material and social circumstances at hand.10
Interweaving Media, Materials and

Those working in Participatory Design know that involving
Practices Volume 1 (New York: ACM,
2004) 192-203; Thomas Riisgaard Hansen
the people, who understand the practices and environments where
et al., “Moving Out of the Laboratory:
new products and services will be used, as active participants in the
Deploying Pervasive Technologies in a
design project means that the process and its outcome are more
Hospital,” IEEE Pervasive Computing
likely to be accepted and sustained. After all, these people know
5, no. 3 (2006): 24-31; Morten Hertzum
most about what the new designs need to do, and will be the key
and Jesper Simonsen, “Effects-Driven
actors in implementing change and making the new practice work.
IT Development: A Strategy for
Sustained Participatory Design and
We have also learned over the years that in the design of complex
Implementation,” in Proceedings of the
products, the success of the outcome is fundamentally linked to the
11th Biennial Conference on Participatory
different voices able to contribute to its design. When different
Design: Participation – the Challenge
voices are heard, understood and heeded in a design process, the
(New York: ACM Press, 2010): 61-70.
results are more likely to be flexible and robust in use, accessible to
10 Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated
Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine
more people, more easily appropriated into changing situations,
Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge
and more adaptable to these situations over time.
University Press, 1987).

An ethical stand underlies Participatory Design in that it
11 Toni Robertson and Ina Wagner, “Ethics:
recognizes the accountability of design to the worlds it creates and
Engagement, Representation, and
the lives of those who inhabit them.11 Working in genuine partner-
Politics-in-Action,” in Jesper Simonsen
ship with those who will use the technologies we build is our way
and Toni Robertson, eds., Handbook of
Participatory Design, 2012.
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of taking a stand on who we can be as designers and design
researchers. Our ongoing challenges are to create the situations in
which these partnerships can flourish and to develop the design
processes, tools, and methods needed to enable full and active par-
ticipation in the full range of design activities.
This Volume
This special issue, Chal enges and Opportunities in Contemporary
Participatory Design, presents insights from the past two PDCs.
Eight papers were selected for their exploration of a wide range of
current challenges and directions in the field, and these have
been reworked, rewritten, and edited for the broader audience of
Design Issues.

The theme for the tenth conference, PDC 2008, was Experi-
ences and Challenges. The theme was chosen to honor two decades of
biennial conferences. Contributors were asked to reflect on past
experiences and review the important lessons we have learned so
as to ready ourselves for the new challenges of the future. Five
papers from this conference were chosen as a basis for this Special
Issue. Together, they explore important trends, phenomena, devel-
opments, and views on both participation and design, which in so
many different ways challenge our traditions, our experiences, and
the current “wisdom” in the field.

After marking the tenth conference with this important
reflection on the past in light of current issues and challenges, the
eleventh conference, PDC 2010, was explicitly a forward-looking
conference. Held in Sydney—for the first time outside the northern
hemisphere—the conference theme, “Participation:: the challenge,”
was chosen to encourage an exploration of what participation can
and needs to mean in current and future design contexts and to
broaden participation in the conferences to include people from
other design domains, as well as from industry (particularly small
design companies) and academia. Three papers from this confer-
ence have been developed for this Special Issue.

Three of the articles in this special issue take up a call from
Dan Shapiro to find ways of bringing Participatory Design into
large development projects.12 Johannessen and Ellingsen argue that
iterative and agile Participatory Design methods can be applied to
large-scale systems development, but this application implies that
complex organizational issues are also addressed as part of the Par-
ticipatory Design process. Their article is grounded in a health-
related project, as is that of Simonsen and Hertzum, which reports
and reflects on the extraordinarily thorough “wizard-of-oz” proto-
12 Dan Shapiro, “Participatory Design:
typing of a new electronic patient record system. Simonsen and
The Will to Succeed,” in Proceedings
Hertzum argue for the extension of well-known iterative
of the 4th Decennial Conference on
approaches in Participatory Design to include the implementation
Critical Computing: Between Sense
of mature prototypes that can be evaluated during real work over
and Sensibility, (New York: ACM, 2005)
29-38.
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an appropriate amount of time. Such long-term evaluation can
follow anticipated changes to practice while emergent and opportu-
nity-based changes are also able to contribute to ongoing design.
These are the changes that can genuinely improve the quality and
acceptance of future systems and that drive the design of better
workplaces and health systems in the future. Dalsgaard’s paper
moves away from information and communication technology
development to examine the extension of Participatory Design
methods and techniques into urban planning. His paper reports
on a large-scale public project in which participatory approaches
were used to bring new ideas from the local community into the
design and building of a new municipal library and the services it
could offer.

Four of the articles in this volume reflect the widening focus
of Participatory Design to include a variety of community settings.
DiSalvo, Louw, Holstius, Nourbakhsh, and Akin contribute a
thoughtful account of engaging ordinary people in creative design
and, through this engagement, their participation in the design of
their local communities. Their particular focus used technology for
environmental sensing, which then enabled the local community to
organize actions around the results. Hess and Pipek provide a criti-
cal investigation of the extent to which online communities can
form a basis for the Participatory Design of a commercial product,
accounting how a software company invited members of its exist-
ing online user community to participate in the further develop-
ment of the product they already use. A study of the design and use
of social technologies in community settings grounds Hagen and
Robertson’s paper. They examine how social technologies are char-
acterized by being designed through use—leading, in turn, to new
forms of participation. Social technologies are widely used in self-
reporting during design projects, but when they are used in the
design of social technologies themselves, they offer many opportu-
nities for seeding content and encouraging participation by the
community for whom the technologies are being developed.

Participatory Design projects in developing countries have
been part of the field for more than 20 years. The account by Win-
schiers-Theophilus, Bidwell, and Blake of African philosophy in
sub-Saharan Africa reminds us of the need to understand and
comply with different cultural traditions in particular cultures and
local environments—particularly in terms of how participation is
understood and practiced. We cannot assume that all our partici-
pants live and act within liberal democracies.

Final y, the strong relations between Participatory Design
and the recent attention to design thinking are drawn out by
Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren. They suggest that some of the
practical, political, and theoretical challenges of Participatory
Design might be relevant to contemporary design thinking. In
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particular, they argue for a move beyond designing objects and
specific design projects to “infrastructuring” design so that condi-
tions are established for continuing participation in the design of
solutions for complex issues and for envisioning positive and sus-
tainable futures.

We hope that readers of Design Issues enjoy this volume with
its presentation of some of the challenges and opportunities in con-
temporary Participatory Design.
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