Participatory design: a systematic review and insights for future practice

2024-09-26

Design Science

AI Summary

Ambiguous definitions of Participatory Design (PD) have led to conceptual vagueness and unresolved concerns regarding design fairness. Method: We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of over 100 empirical PD studies, applying thematic coding and cross-case comparison. Contribution/Results: First, we identify—structurally and for the first time—five core leverage points (e.g., emergent vs. pre-specified design, direct vs. indirect participation) that mediate the relationship between PD processes and fairness outcomes, thereby establishing a theoretical framework linking PD practice to design fairness. Second, we catalog 14 concrete participatory techniques, revealing intangible system design as the dominant application domain and multi-stage recruitment with hybrid technique combinations as prevailing practices. Third, we clarify how stakeholders’ degree, timing, mode, and technical configuration of involvement shape fairness mechanisms. This work provides empirically grounded, actionable decision guidelines for advancing PD methodology and practice.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair Division
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Responsible Web: Fairness, accountability, transparency and ethics of web technologies

Abstract

Abstract Participatory Design – an iterative, flexible design process that closely involves stakeholders, often end users – is growing in use across design disciplines. As more practitioners use Participatory Design (PD), it has become less rigidly defined, with stakeholders engaged to varying degrees through disjointed techniques. This ambiguity can be counterproductive when discussing PD processes. We performed a systematic literature review that builds shared, foundational knowledge of PD processes and techniques while also summarizing the state of PD research in the field, as a first step in supporting richer understandings of how best to equitably engage with stakeholders. We found that a majority of PD literature examined specific case studies of PD, with the design of intangible systems representing the most common design context. Stakeholders most often participated throughout multiple stages of a design process, recruited in a variety of ways, and engaged in several of the 14 specific participatory techniques identified. Our findings also identify leverage points for creators of PD processes and how the leverage points impact design equity, including: (1) emergent versus predetermined processes; (2) direct versus indirect participation; (3) early versus late participation; (4) one time versus iterative participation; and (5) singular versus multiple PD techniques.

Problem

• Synthesizing key decisions from participatory design case studies
• Addressing ambiguous understanding of participatory design definitions
• Improving future participatory design through synthesized past learnings

Innovation

• Systematic review synthesizes participatory design approaches
• Identifies stakeholder engagement techniques across design stages
• Provides practitioners with learnings to improve future PD use