Participatory Design Tools: Exploring the Value of Design through Materiality
Awais Hameed Khan · 2020
As participatory design (PD) approaches become a normative part of contemporary business practice, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that PD tools and methods are accessible and understandable to a larger audience, to fully mobilise and harness their value. This research seeks to explore the materiality of different PD tools and methods as a means to articulate the value of design to broader participant groups, explore what tools can be brought in from everyday use artefacts to reduce the barrier of participation, and what implications their use has on understanding the value of design. A series of experiments are conducted in a variety of distinct, specific contexts to explore the materiality as part of a broader program of research. The contribution aims to develop a suite of strong concepts that can be used to inform design practice and subsequent development of PD tools.