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Participatory Design: Principles and Practices
... The researcher has collaboratively co-design lessons with the teachers who are selected as pilots, therefore the participatory design is the methodological approach for this research. Participatory design is a set of theories, practices, and studies related to end-users as full participants in activities leading to software and hardware computer products and computer-based activities (Greenbaum & Kyng, 1991;Muller & Kuhn, 1993;Schuler & Namioka, 1993;Muller & Druin, 2013). The essence of participatory design is about empowering the users and developing communication and collaboration between designers and users. ...
... It attempts to actively involve all stakeholders in the design process to ensure that the product/outcome meets the needs and expectations of all. It focuses on the process and procedures of design and not so much on the appropriateness and perfection of the design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993). Schuler and Namioka (1993) state that participatory design represents a new approach toward computer systems design in which the people defined to use the system play a critical role in designing. ...
... It focuses on the process and procedures of design and not so much on the appropriateness and perfection of the design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993). Schuler and Namioka (1993) state that participatory design represents a new approach toward computer systems design in which the people defined to use the system play a critical role in designing. ...
The current study has derived inspiration from the design thinking approach as one of the pedagogical means to respond to the need for teaching, learning, and assessment in the twenty-first century. Specifically, the study was intended to explore strategies to implement design thinking’ in designing and delivering lessons in higher secondary-level biology classrooms. The study employed a participatory design approach which involved the participation of the researcher with the selected teachers in the co-design of biology lessons. This study was carried out over two weeks in one of the higher secondary schools in Samtse district, Bhutan. Hence, data for this study was obtained from the researcher’s qualitative notes based on field engagement with three piloted teachers, and teaching observations. The data from observation field notes were presented in narrative descriptions, to provide rich descriptions of classroom activities and tasks, teacher and students’ classroom interactions, and the design thinking process followed in the teaching and learning process. Findings revealed that both teachers and students have positive perceptions about the application of design thinking in biology class. The application of design thinking in biology class offers an opportunity for students to learn through the highest degree of collaboration, interaction, and creative thinking, unlike in a conventional classroom. Additionally, this offers an opportunity for building a foundation for teachers and educators to revitalize educational practices to prepare students to thrive in the modern era, by equipping students with the tools and capacity for innovative and creative thinking and the ability to solve problems.
... In the article, we consider the project hin&weg, which follows the goal of developing an ultimately open-source software package for analysing and visualising users' origin-destination mobility data, with multiple local governments' involvement. We turn to concepts from participatory IT development, also known as participatory design (Schuler and Namioka, 1993), for ideas on enhancing IT development through structured participatory input. The participation process in the hin&weg project consisted of alpha-and a beta-phase involving staff from ultimately 18 local governments, followed by a third phase for preparing the software release. ...
... The emphasis is on the process of IT-Development, which means first and foremost having a clear structure to guide the software development. Often, especially in Scandinavian IT-Development (Schuler and Namioka, 1993), the organisational and institutional support allows for full participation of software developers and users, which means complete cooperation during every design step and often involving full participation in all related work. The resulting organisational challenges (discussed in the following subsection) can be insurmountable, and often structures develop to find the best pragmatic compromise. ...
Participatory planning holds important lessons for improving local government capabilities and responsiveness, but overall procedural regulations and statutory frameworks make its relevance for participatory IT development often just a matter of compliance. Developing analytical visualisations to support local government faces significant challenges because of the complexity and uncertainty about long-term benefits. We designed the process and local government staff understood their participation in an organised process. After each segment and the programming implementation, a new version of the software integrates improvements for participants.The participation process involved staff from ultimately 18 local governments. Participation became a verb describing the process that informed the directions to which we took up local government input.
... Open design brought new perspectives on the end user/consumer: stakeholders and end-users appropriating concepts like user-centered design, participatory design, user innovation Schuler & Namioka, 1993 ;Norman & Draper, 1986 ;Stappers et al., 2011 p. 6;Nickerson et al., 2011) and user experience (UX). The user-centered approach considers the user the main actor of the project, establishing ways to look for their real needs. ...
... The user-centered approach considers the user the main actor of the project, establishing ways to look for their real needs. On the other hand, Schuler and Namioka (1993 ) de ned participatory design as "a new approach towards computer systems/software engineering design in which the people destined to use the system play a critical role in designing it". ...
... 22 Researchers in HIT have been increasingly using this methodology to generate innovative and highquality results. 23,24 A total of 15 participants were recruited from 3 EMS organizations (Table 1). Two organizations (A and B) are hospital-based EMS agencies in an urban area in the US Northeast region while organization C is a fire-based EMS agency located in a rural area in the US mountain region. ...
Objective
This study aims to investigate key considerations and critical factors that influence the implementation and adoption of smart glasses in fast-paced medical settings such as emergency medical services (EMS).
Materials and Methods
We employed a sociotechnical theoretical framework and conducted a set of participatory design workshops with 15 EMS providers to elicit their opinions and concerns about using smart glasses in real practice.
Results
Smart glasses were recognized as a useful tool to improve EMS workflow given their hands-free nature and capability of processing and capturing various patient data. Out of the 8 dimensions of the sociotechnical model, we found that hardware and software, human-computer interface, workflow, and external rules and regulations were cited as the major factors that could influence the adoption of this novel technology. EMS participants highlighted several key requirements for the successful implementation of smart glasses in the EMS context, such as durable devices, easy-to-use and minimal interface design, seamless integration with existing systems and workflow, and secure data management.
Discussion
Applications of the sociotechnical model allowed us to identify a range of factors, including not only technical aspects, but also social, organizational, and human factors, that impact the implementation and uptake of smart glasses in EMS. Our work informs design implications for smart glass applications to fulfill EMS providers’ needs.
Conclusion
The successful implementation of smart glasses in EMS and other dynamic healthcare settings needs careful consideration of sociotechnical issues and close collaboration between different stakeholders.
... A design approach where users participate in its process is traditionally called participatory design (PD; Schuler & Namioka 1993;Kensing & Blomberg 1998). It has been actively studied and practised since the 1970s, primarily in Scandinavian countries. ...
In recent years, ‘living lab (LL)’, a design approach that actively involves users as partners from the early stage of the design process, has been attracting much attention. Compared with the traditional participatory design or co-design approaches, one of the distinctive features of the LL approach is that the process of and opportunity for user participation tends to be long-term and complex. Thus, LL practitioners must appropriately plan and design effective integration of user participation into the design process to promote co-creation with users. In other words, LL practitioners are required to ‘configure user participation’ for the effective promotion of co-creation. However, to date, the knowledge on how to properly configure long-term and complex user participation in LLs has not been systematically clarified, nor have its methodologies been developed. This study develops a novel framework for configuring user participation in LLs. Through a literature review and analysis on LL case studies, we identified the 11 key elements in five categories that should be considered while configuring user participation in LLs. Furthermore, on the basis of the identified elements, we developed a novel framework for configuring user participation in LLs, which is called the participation blueprint. We have demonstrated its use and have also discussed its theoretical and practical contributions to the LL and co-design research community.
... Therefore, designers, researchers, and practitioners need to be engaged in long-term collaborations (Reeves et al., 2004). User involvement in HCI research is grounded on theories derived from Cooperative Design (Bødker et al. 1988), Participatory Design (Schuler and Namioka, 1993;Simonsen and Robertson, 2013), Contextual Inquiry (Beyer and Holtzblatt 1998), Activity Theory (Nardi 1996) and situated action (Suchman 1987). However, there is no unified view of how user participation should take place (Muller and Druin, 2010). ...
This dissertation focuses on better achieving co-design of Full-Body interactive learning experiences with children and experts (teachers, museum curators, pedagogues, etc.). Hence, on the one hand, it has studies how to better design Full-Body Interaction for children in public spaces and, on the other, how to achieve a better involvement of co-designers during the design process to have their voice and vision in the final experiences. The study focuses specifically on learning experiences for public space. These non-formal learning contexts (such as museums, cultural heritage sites and theatres) are characterized by the relation of people’s behaviour in shared experiences and their interactions with socio-cultural contents that are meaningful for society. Previous research has pointed towards the benefits of the specific properties of Full-Body Interaction for shared experience in public spaces. However, methods to design with and for the body in this research area are still unexplored. To address this challenge, this thesis presents the design and analysis of three Full-Body interactive experiences. The main goal is to research techniques that promote children’s embodied awareness and focus on their expertise in movement, playfulness and socialization.
This thesis proposes a set of Embodied Design Thinking qualities to understand the benefits and limitations of design techniques for Full-Body Interaction with children. On the other hand, the findings of this research lead to the definition of a preliminary Full-Body Interaction co-design method (FUBImethod). This method entails a set of clearly defined steps to help interaction designers in guiding intergenerational teams with children to understand and foster the role of the body in a Full-Body Interaction experience. This method summarizes the main outcomes of this research and represents a guideline for design and evaluation strategies in this research context.
... In educational contexts, as the relevant literature states, pupils as active members of the school community should be called upon to contribute to the development of their own educational environment, thus increasing a sense of ownership and enhancing motivation (Stukalina, 2010;Woolner, Hall, Wall, & Dennison, 2007). This approach, at the same time, leads to quality improvements, since end users participate in the planning process, and ensures democratic participation in all aspects of design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993). The fundamental ideas and features of PD have been applied to educational research, especially for the creation of innovative teaching and learning practices, technological objects and tools, in the context of educational reform attempts (Cober, McCann, Moher, & Slotta, 2013). ...
This paper reports results of completed research with primary school children which took place in Athens, Greece. Children engaged in designing the play experience of digital mini-games corresponding to episodes/missions of an entire plot. The games were coded by the school teacher on low-end mobile phones using AppInventor and were then played by children designers and testers. The game plot concerned restoring management rules for a public space (an urban park), along sustainability principles. The results focused on the participation processes of children in critical game narrative design, and decision-making about public space management alternatives to embed in game narrative design.
... We chose to conduct ethnographic research once it analyses the behavior of a group, social or cultural system, and is based on a deep description and interpretation of personal experiences within the studied contexts, combining observation, attentive listening, and participation in community events [75,76], facilitating data interpretation [77]. We collected primary and secondary kinds of data. ...
Knowledge management (KM) is currently an important driver to develop dynamic capabilities for businesses, on behalf of competitiveness. Nonetheless, some critical success factors are hampering KM implementation, such as a lack of a KM strategy, cultural aspects, leadership, and technology. In this paper, we focused on the KM implementation within Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) by exploring Participatory Design potential to KM implementation in SMEs, by focusing on information technology as a critical success factor and exploring some organizational culture characteristics that can help in this context. To achieve this goal, we conducted an ethnographic study in the real environment of a consulting firm which is starting its own KM project. Our results show that Participatory Design might be recommended to SMEs’ KM implementation, by taking advantage of already available, but underused technological tools.
... Our proposed Participatory Data Design extends the well-known procedures of participatory design (e.g. Schuler and Namioka, 1993). We also must acknowledge the different power balances that exist both in research and technical development. ...
Within the software engineering community, deciding how to collect, store and use personal data has become about more than just understanding our users. This paper considers ethical data use that includes cultural considerations and data ownership rights. We discuss indigenous data sovereignty as a concept and how it potentially impacts technological solutions that gather personal data from users. We propose an extension to typical user-centred design processes, which we call participatory data design. This incorporates the use of frameworks and tools that specifically focus on managing data within the cultural context it is gathered from. We also present a specific example of how we have used this approach in the context of a data collection project from Māori workers in New Zealand forestry. We conclude with a discussion of the wider implications of this approach.
... Future work could explore how guiding users' understandability and interpretability of AI explanations could help calibrated trust. Also, approaches like Participatory Design (Schuler and Namioka, 1993) and Co-Design (Sanders and Stappers, 2008) that involve users early in the process will lead to more acceptable and interpretable explanations that fit their target groups. ...
Machine learning has made rapid advances in safety-critical applications, such as traffic control, finance, and healthcare. With the criticality of decisions they support and the potential consequences of following their recommendations, it also became critical to provide users with explanations to interpret machine learning models in general, and black-box models in particular. However, despite the agreement on explainability as a necessity, there is little evidence on how recent advances in eXplainable Artificial Intelligence literature (XAI) can be applied in collaborative decision-making tasks, i.e., Human decision-maker and an AI system working together, to contribute to the process of trust calibration effectively. This research conducts an empirical study to evaluate four XAI classes for their impact on trust calibration. We take clinical decision support systems as a case study and adopt a within-subject design followed by semi-structured interviews. We gave participants clinical scenarios and XAI interfaces as a basis for decision-making and rating tasks. Our study involved 41 medical practitioners who use clinical decision support systems frequently. We found that users perceive the contribution of explanations to trust calibration differently according to the XAI class and to whether XAI interface design fits their job constraints and scope. We revealed additional requirements on how explanations shall be instantiated and designed to help a better trust calibration. Finally, we build on our findings and present guidelines for designing XAI interfaces.
... A participatory design approach was established to investigate factors conducive to sharing or those which might hinder it. In participatory design, the intended users of the artefacts to be delivered (i.e. the residents and workers of the Sharing Cities demonstration area) are partners of the creative process to be engaged in order to achieve meaningful results (Schuler and Namiioka, 1993). In the domain of urban planning, participation has been a widely consolidated practice since the end of the 1960s, aimed at enhancing democracy through shared decision-making on topics affecting places and communities, as every person should have the right to participate in making decisions which affect one's own life (Davidoff, 1965). ...
Participatory approach for a sharing city: understanding citizens’ perceptions in a neighbourhood of Milan-Sharing cities may limit negative impacts of global urbanisation by connecting more users with distributed assets. Nevertheless, several scholars raised concerns of unintended consequences. With technology at the core of such strategies, marginal is the attention to citizen engagement and perceptions by people in their context. The authors aim to contribute with participatory methods and tools for capturing people’s feelings and habits about sharing. This paper presents the insights of a workshop held in 2017 with 18 residents of the Milan’s neighbourhood of Porta Romana-Vettabbia to identify how sharing is or may be embedded in practice. Negotiation of trust, logistical convenience and monetary saving dramatically resulted to intervene in the integration or consideration of sharing.
... Research in the field of human-computer interaction has long acknowledged the importance of actively engaging the eventual users of technologies in their design [22], such as via participatory or ethnographic methods that enable designers to deeply understand the context and problems being addressed [23][24][25]. Without taking the time to learn people's current practices and understand their perspectives, priorities, and values, designers run the risk of building technologies that are not appropriate or usable and fail to meet people's true needs. ...
Background:
Home health aides (HHAs) provide necessary hands-on care to older adults and those with chronic conditions in their homes. Despite their integral role, HHAs experience numerous challenges on the job, including their ability to communicate with other healthcare professionals about patient care while caring for patients and access educational resources. While technological interventions have the potential to address these challenges, little is known about the technological landscape and existing tech-based interventions designed for and used by this workforce.
Objective:
We conducted a scoping review of the scientific literature to identify existing studies which have described, designed, deployed, and/or tested technology-based tools and apps intended for use by HHAs to care for patients in the home. To complement our literature review, we conducted a landscape analysis of existing mobile apps intended for HHAs providing in home care.
Methods:
We searched the following databases from inception to October 2020: Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid EMBASE, Cochrane Library, and CINAHL (EBSCO). Three researchers screened the yield using pre-specified inclusion and exclusion criteria. Four researchers then independently reviewed these articles and a fifth arbitrated when needed. Among studies that met the inclusion criteria, data were extracted and summarized narratively. An analysis of mHealth apps designed for HHAs was performed using a predefined set of terms to search the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Two researchers independently screened the resulting apps and those that met the inclusion criteria were categorized according to their intended purpose and functionality.
Results:
Of the 8,643 studies retrieved, 182 underwent full-text review, and 9 met our inclusion criteria. Half (n=4) were descriptive in nature, proposing technology-based systems (e.g., web-portal, dashboard) and/or prototypes without a technical or user-based evaluation of the technology. In most papers (n=7), HHAs were just one of several users and not the sole/primary intended user of the technology. Our review of mobile apps yielded 166 Android and iOS apps, of which 48 met the inclusion criteria. These apps provided HHAs with one or more of the following functions: electronic visit verification (29), clocking in and out (23), documentation (22), task checklist (19), communication between HHA and agency (14), patient information (6), resources (5), and communication between HHA and patients (4). Overall, of the 48 apps, 25 performed monitoring functions, 4 supporting functions, and 19 did both.
Conclusions:
A limited number of studies and mobile apps are designed to support HHAs on the job. Further research and rigorous evaluation of technology-based tools are needed to assess their impact on the work HHAs provide in patient's homes.
Clinicaltrial:
... In the field of sustainability science, there has been increasing awareness of the importance of public engagement in democratic decision-making processes (Archibugi & Cellini, 2017;Kasemir et al., 2003;Kates et al., 2001;Lang et al., 2012;Schuler & Namioka, 1993). ...
Designing backcasting scenarios is a powerful approach to the development of sustainable visions and pathways for governments or enterprises in the early stage of their policy‐making or strategic decision‐making process. To date, a number of scholars have proposed various backcasting methods, in which workshops are often used to reflect the voices of stakeholders. However, it is still a challenge to test the validity of scenarios because the process of designing backcasting scenarios is not transparent or shared among involved stakeholders. This also prevents reusing knowledge and intermediate outputs generated during the scenario design process. To solve these problems, this paper aims to develop a method for supporting a backcasting scenario design by introducing computational assistance. A scenario design support system called the sustainable society scenario (3S) simulator is used to visualize a scenario's logical sequence of the scenario in graph format. To demonstrate the proposed method, a case study for the city of Toyama, a Japanese municipality, was performed using three workshops with citizen participation. The results showed that two different scenarios, involving future visions and associated pathways, were developed by reflecting the diversified values of local citizens. The usage of the 3S simulator visualized the logical relations of the described scenarios, which consist of five blocks—problem definition, subgoals to achieve visions, measures to attain these subgoals, verification, and conclusions. This visualization is effective to increase the verifiability and reusability of the scenarios for evidence‐based policy‐making processes.
... Besides our underlying experience-based constructionist approach to teaching/learning, the students made use of inclusive and participatory practices of design (Baranauskas, 2014;Liu, 2000;Schuler & Namioka, 1993). The proposed syllabus was based on classical HCI textbooks as, for example, Jenny Preece and Sharp (2015) and Norman (2004), and a local textbook by Rocha and Baranauskas (2003), with topics, such as: ...
As new technologies constantly change what we understand as a computer, Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) educators need to stay updated and prepare their students to work with an ever-growing number of socio-technical situations. This phenomenon constitutes a challenge for HCI syllabuses and practices, demanding diversified approaches to HCI education. In this article, we articulate Papert’s constructionism with Dewey’s theory of experience to propose an experience-based constructionism approach to practices in HCI education. We illustrate our approach in a case study with 55 computing undergraduate students engaged in the design and construction of open-ended, physical interactive artworks. Nine interactive artifacts were created. The students have shown an effective experience with our approach, reporting an expanded view of HCI, and demonstrating competence in appropriating new methods and instruments, suggesting the effectiveness of our approach to HCI education. Results of this work may encourage other HCI educators and practitioners to experience the proposed approach in their specific contexts.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Many developing countries are attempting to prevent a rapid deterioration of air quality while still encouraging economic growth. In settings where state capacity is severely limited, enhancing the effectiveness of regulators is critical to success. Previous work has documented how Indian environmental regulators are constrained by having poor information on the pollution emitted by manufacturing plants, due to high monitoring costs, corruption, or staff constraints. This case study discusses a pilot project in the Indian state of Gujarat, designed to evaluate the benefits of Continuous Emissions Monitoring Systems (CEMS) – technology used to remotely monitor pollution emitted by industrial plants in real time. We show how the institutional context in which CEMS was deployed, which included an inflexible legal and regulatory framework and collusion between industry and labs to falsify data, cannot be divorced from an assessment of the performance of the technology solution. The eventual benefits of CEMS in the status quo regulatory framework proved limited. Nevertheless, the technology also provided an opportunity to change the rules of the game, allowing Gujarat to experiment with India’s first emissions trading scheme.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Two major challenges face humanity in the coming century. The first is to generate the innovations and productivity improvements that will keep people on a path to higher standards of living. The second is to ensure that expanding human activity does not generate negative environmental externalities that block this path to progress. In short, our future is about balancing the need for growth with the externalities that arise from that growth.KeywordsTechnology and DevelopmentTradeFinancial TechnologiesEnergy and EnvironmentClimate ChangeSustainability
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa produce much of the food consumed across the continent, yet with expected population growth, they will need to double production by 2050. Smallholders could significantly intensify production with the adoption of modern agricultural technologies, but many farmers are unable to find buyers willing to purchase their outputs at profitable prices. Meanwhile, buyers and traders have demand for agricultural goods but face high costs in finding farmers who can consistently supply goods with certified quality. Similarly, there is a lack of investment in food processing infrastructure because processors cannot reliably obtain produce as inputs to operations. These market failures typically manifest in the form of two development challenges: (1) there is a misalignment in the supply of and demand for the agricultural goods produced by smallholder farmers, and (2) smallholder farmers are often at a price disadvantage when it comes to knowledge of prices of their commodities. This case study measures the effect of introducing digital trading and market platforms (including price alerts, mobile phone-based trading platforms, and commodity exchanges) in Ghana, through a series of randomized control trials and quasi-experimental studies. Technologies like mobile price alerts (from Esoko) and a mobile phone-based trading platform (Kudu) are found to increase yam prices by 5%, with benefits for smallholder farmers. This increase declines over time, but there are net benefits for farmers as a result of “bargaining spillover.” The potential impacts of a new commodity exchange in Ghana are also discussed, exploring how this technology can influence the decisions of smallholder farmers, incentivizing them to produce higher-quality products.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Low state capacity makes it difficult for governments in developing countries to deliver resources to the poor. In this chapter, we highlight the role that biometric authentication can play in delivering payments and subsidized food to the poor. We describe the implementation and evaluation of two different biometric authentication systems in Andhra Pradesh (“AP Smartcards”) and Jharkhand (“Aadhaar”), India. Results from two large-scale RCTs (Muralidharan et al., 2016 and Muralidharan et al., 2020b) showed that more accurate biometric ID systems, coupled with payments and policy reforms, reduced leakages in welfare schemes in both Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand. However, there were varying results on beneficiary welfare. In Jharkhand, reduced fiscal leakage came at the expense of excluding genuine beneficiaries who were unable to meet new standards for identification. Exclusion of beneficiaries was low in Andhra Pradesh, where the government was more focused on improving beneficiary experience with welfare programs. The studies discussed in this chapter highlight how differences in policy priorities and the details of solution design influence the extent to which beneficiaries benefit from biometric authentication and accompanying reforms.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
More than 617 million children and adolescents lack the basic reading and mathematics skills required to live healthy and productive lives. Malawi ranks particularly poorly, with an average pupil to teacher ratio of 77:1 and a 50% dropout rate among primary school children. Established in 2013, the Unlocking Talent initiative uses e-Learning technology to help overcome educational challenges. It equips touch-screen tablets with customisable software that delivers lessons through multisensory experiences (e.g. pictures, sound, video and animation). Throughout Malawi, small groups of students in public primary schools have accessed these tablets during weekly sessions on-site. This case study describes a series of evaluations of this e-Learning technology in Malawi, conducted in tandem with experiments in other countries (including the United Kingdom, Brazil, South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia). Following a pilot evaluation to assess the feasibility of e-Learning in raising learning outcomes, multiple large-scale randomised control trials were conducted. Learning gains hold across multiple cohorts of children and across different countries, generating more than a 3-month advantage in basic mathematics and more than a 4-month advantage in basic reading on average. The intervention also bridges gender gaps in mathematics skills attainment in Malawi.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
A lack of electoral integrity in developing democracies undermines political accountability and the public good by yielding leaders who lack a governing mandate. Despite citizen activism and resources from donors to improve transparency, poor administrative functioning, corruption, and barriers to participation persistently degrade elections. This chapter presents “photo quick count” election technology and an ICT-enabled citizen adaption platform “VIP:Voice.” Photo quick count is a low-cost, ICT-capable, independently managed monitoring system of election results that provides polling station level photographic records of tally sheets to audit alongside certified results. The audit detects procedural failures by election officials and aggregation fraud (rigging that occurs in results transmission), and can deter administrative problems and corruption by announcing the audit to polling officials. First deployed in Afghanistan, iterations in Uganda and Kenya helped develop usage across national coverage and new mobile devices. This pivoted to broadening adoption and functionality using a crowdsourced platform in South Africa, VIP:Voice, that recruited citizen users through ICT channels with no pre-existing infrastructure and incorporates volunteers for photo quick count. This case furthers evidence on instruments for policy guidance on the mechanisms and cost-effective tools to bolster institutional performance and elections at scale.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Technological change has always played a role in shaping human progress. From the power loom to the mobile phone, new technologies have continuously influenced how social and economic activities are organized—sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Agricultural technologies, for example, have increased the efficiency of agricultural production and catalyzed the restructuring of economies (Bustos et al., 2016). At the same time, these innovations have degraded the environment and, in some cases, fueled inequality (Foster and Rosenzweig, 2008; Pingali, 2012). Information technology has played a catalytic role in social development, enabling collective action and inclusive political movements (Enikolopov et al., 2020; Manacorda & Tesei, 2020); yet it has also fueled political violence and perhaps even genocide (Pierskalla & Hollenbach, 2013; Fink, 2018).
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Community networking can provide telecommunications in unserved and underserved areas where markets fail to deliver adequate Internet service due to high risk of investment and limited returns. This has left an estimated 400 million people worldwide in areas uncovered by mobile networks. In much of the Philippines, with just under 70% mobile phone penetration, unserved communities have limited connectivity options. We describe the CoCoMoNets (Connecting Communities through Mobile Networks) project implemented by the University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) and international researchers, which delivered basic mobile telephony to remote rural barangays through community cellular networks. The core technology is a low-power, low-cost GSM base station operating at a fraction of the capital and recurring costs of traditional equipment. Deploying Filipino community networks presented unique challenges requiring extensive stakeholder coordination, including an MNO, regulators, local governments, local cooperatives, and end users. The project team encountered challenges including spectrum sharing, tower licensing, geographical remoteness, maintenance difficulties, local politics, and community relations. This chapter documents the project’s experiences and challenges in testing the community cellular model in the real world. After 2 years of operation, the researchers summarize their learnings to contribute to the development of future approaches in delivering sustainable last-mile communication access.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Absenteeism of government frontline health workers can prevent access to primary care, including outpatient care, pre- and postnatal care, deliveries, and vaccinations. As rates of absenteeism tend to be higher in lower-income areas, this issue has the potential to exacerbate the socioeconomic divide. Specifically in Punjab, Pakistan, government doctors posted to rural health clinics, called Basic Health Units (BHUs), were found to be absent two-thirds of the time. Health inspectors are employed to visit BHUs at least once a month to collect data from a paper-based register located at each BHU and ensure doctors are present. However, absenteeism of the government inspectors causes this system to break down. This case study follows the implementation of the “Monitoring the Monitors” program, which aimed to replace the paper-based record-keeping system with an app-based system that feeds an online dashboard system (for real-time aggregation and presentation of data). Conducting a large-scale randomized controlled trial, inspection rates increased from 25.5% to 51.9% after 6 months. After a year of operation, inspection rates were 33.8% in the treatment districts and 23.5% in control districts. An A/B test was used to measure the effect of a simple flagging system that notified senior health officials when health workers were absent during an inspection and showed an increase in doctor attendance from 23.6% to 41.3%. The government eventually adopted this system (rebranded as HealthWatch), and it is now one of the many apps being used to monitor frontline service providers.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
What challenges arise when deploying a novel technology at increasing scale? This case study details our experience developing and deploying technologies to monitor power outages and voltage fluctuations at high temporal and geographic frequency. After a small initial pilot, our deployment grew over time and eventually exceeded 450 sensors and 3500 mobile app downloads with households and firms across Accra, Ghana. Our first lesson is that ad hoc solutions to deployment challenges may not scale, as larger scales bring unique challenges requiring unique and progressively more complex solutions. Second, challenges that arise with scale span distinct domains – not only technological but also cultural, organizational, and operational. Finally, we stress the importance of adaptability of operational structure, and of frequently updating operational strategy based on new learnings.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Providing information at scale about improved agricultural practices to smallholder farmers remains a challenge in most developing countries. Traditional dissemination methods like in-person meetings or radio programming can be costly to scale or offer too generic information. Moreover, while most agronomic recommendations focus on maximizing crop yields, farmers weigh multiple other factors when making farming decisions, such as the profitability of investments and risks. The proliferation of mobile phones has shifted these trends. Mobile agriculture extension can cost-effectively provide tailored suggestions to farmers and improve their use of information. This case study describes the use of digital extension technologies to support farmers in a number of contexts. We draw insights from various studies and the experience of Precision Development on the importance of human-centered design, monitoring, and continuous experimentation. The chapter also discusses the ecosystem of stakeholders for digital agriculture, concerns relating to privacy and financing, and how mobile services can be used to facilitate social learning.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Internet technologies – like social media platforms and discussion forums – have transformed how people communicate with each other. In addition to improving access to information, news, and entertainment, they have impacted governance, politics, civil society movements, crisis response, marketplaces, and healthcare, among other parts of our lives. Although concerns regarding data misuse, privacy breaches, and overuse have grown recently, these technologies are continuing to soar, mostly among literate, urban, and connected communities, all across the world. However, despite their promises (and pitfalls), these technologies currently exclude billions of people worldwide who are too remote to access the Internet, too low-literate to navigate the mostly text-driven Internet, or too poor to afford Internet-enabled devices. This chapter presents the innovation, implementation, and adaptation of voice forums that have evolved over the last two decades, discusses challenges that plagued their growth, and highlights ingenious solutions that were used to address their pain points.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
This chapter outlines a practical framework for designing scalable technology solutions that solve development challenges. We begin with an overview of the common constraints to sustainable development that often are encountered in the context of poverty. These constraints are based on a large body of research in development economics, political economy, psychology, and other social sciences; and they help to explain why engineering innovations so frequently fail to achieve outcomes when implemented in the real world. In the second part of this chapter, we provide a framework for implementing development engineering projects, consisting of four key activities: innovation, implementation, evaluation, and adaptation. Combining these activities in an iterative (and usually nonlinear) path allows the researcher to anticipate and design around the most common pitfalls associated with “technology for development.”
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Although it was reported in 2012 that 89% of the world’s population had access to piped water, it is estimated that at least one billion people receive this water for fewer than 24 h per day. Intermittency places a variety of burdens upon households, including inadequate quantities of supply at the household level, unpredictability of water utilities in making water available, and a disproportionate time burden on poorer households. For many intermittent water systems, the availability of water is controlled by valvemen who turn access on/off to various portions of their service area. Using this information, NextDrop sends notifications via mobile phones to customers as to when water is likely to be available. Although a pilot of NextDrop was successfully implemented in Hubli-Dharwad in India, NextDrop faced significant challenges when expanding to Bangalore. This case study investigates how a breakdown in the information pipeline, as well as corresponding human factors, prevented adoption of NextDrop in Bangalore. Specifically, randomized controlled trials found that valvemen sent reports of their activities to NextDrop only 70% of the time. Even when NextDrop passed messages onto customers, only 38% of customers reported receiving notifications, primarily because either the household “waiters” for water, usually women, did not have daytime access to the mobile phone registered with NextDrop or the notifications are buried under the many other solicitations and informational messages regularly received via SMS. Valvemen were further studied through observation and semi-structured interviews to understand their incentives for complying with NextDrop.
... This broadening of scope and critical reflection of the design process also has a long history in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Science, Technology and Society (STS) literature, where concepts of reflective design [74], participatory design [73], and value sensitive design [28,96] provide frameworks to bridge the gap between designers, users, and their implicitly held values in the design process. Shared by these design frameworks is the idea that a computational system designer's choices embed implicit assumptions and values, and in order to best serve the user, the system designer must incorporate the evaluation of these values into the development process. ...
Machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly prevalent in education, from their use in predicting student dropout, to assisting in university admissions, and facilitating the rise of MOOCs. Given the rapid growth of these novel uses, there is a pressing need to investigate how ML techniques support long-standing education principles and goals. In this work, we shed light on this complex landscape drawing on qualitative insights from interviews with education experts. These interviews comprise in-depth evaluations of ML for education (ML4Ed) papers published in preeminent applied ML conferences over the past decade. Our central research goal is to critically examine how the stated or implied education and societal objectives of these papers are aligned with the ML problems they tackle. That is, to what extent does the technical problem formulation, objectives, approach, and interpretation of results align with the education problem at hand. We find that a cross-disciplinary gap exists and is particularly salient in two parts of the ML life cycle: the formulation of an ML problem from education goals and the translation of predictions to interventions. We use these insights to propose an extended ML life cycle, which may also apply to the use of ML in other domains. Our work joins a growing number of meta-analytical studies across education and ML research, as well as critical analyses of the societal impact of ML. Specifically, it fills a gap between the prevailing technical understanding of machine learning and the perspective of education researchers working with students and in policy.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
By 2012, the civil war in Darfur, Sudan, had been ongoing for 9 years. The war had displaced missions of people and concentrated them into camps for internally-displaced people. This put immense strain on the local availability of woody biomass used for cooking. Women are primarily responsible for collecting fuelwood, and it was estimated that a 7-hour round trip was necessary to collect sufficient firewood for 2 or 3 days, causing great physical hardship to the women and exposing them to extreme risk of sexual violence as they ventured outside the safety of the camps. The Berkeley-Darfur Stove had been demonstrated to reduce fuel use by roughly 50%. However, recall error and social-desirability bias makes evaluating stove use through surveys challenging. This case study chronicles the integration of low-cost temperature sensors into the Berkeley-Darfur Stove to measure actual use (in contrast to self-reported use), as well as the challenges associated with conducting fieldwork and processing large datasets. Based on this work, it was determined that at least 75% of the women who received the Berkeley-Darfur Stove for free actually adopted it for routine use. Additionally, it was (serendipitously) found that just the act of conducting follow-up surveys had a significant positive impact on adoption. In-person surveys were also conducted, and no correlation was found between the stated use frequency of the cookstoves and the measured use frequency (as determined by the sensors), likely due to the social-desirability bias. This work has launched a variety of ventures including the development of data processing software, improved sensor design, and—most recently—the founding of Geocene, a company focused on expanding the application of remote sensors and providing consulting for companies building Internet of Things (IoT) products.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
In the 1980s, most households of rural India and Bangladesh switched from surface sources for their drinking water – which was causing high incidence of diarrheal disease – to groundwater extracted by hand pumps. However, for tens of millions of people, this groundwater contained high levels of arsenic, which has led to what the WHO has called the “largest mass poisoning of a population in history.” This case study describes the development of ElectroChemical Arsenic Remediation (ECAR), which is a technology that uses iron electrodes to oxidize and remove aqueous arsenic from drinking water. Pilot evaluation of ECAR began in 2011, with a 100 L reactor at a school in Amirabad. However, political tensions in Amirabad caused the subsequent 600 L reactor pilot to be relocated to a school in Dhapdhapi. The findings from this pilot enabled the construction of a 10,000-liter per day (LPD) ECAR plant at Dhapdhapi. During this scaling up process, technical and contextual challenges were encountered and overcome, including those arising from intermittent power supply and a hot/humid climate. Additionally, implementation challenges included training of local operators, ensuring continuity of knowledge within the team, revisiting and correcting early mistakes, and additional engineering work needed during commissioning. The 10,000 LPD plant has been successful both technically and financially. However, after the handoff of the ECAR technology and plant to the local partner, Livpure in 2016, no widespread replication of ECAR plants in the region has occurred. The engineering science behind ECAR continues to be an active area of research, with ongoing projects investigating the implementation of next-generation ECAR technologies in rural California and the Philippines.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Only 10–15% of Nairobi’s informal settlements are sewered, and these sewer pipes are often broken or clogged. In addition to posing a threat to human health, human waste contains high concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus, which can wreak ecological harm when improperly discharged. However, nitrogen and phosphorus are also key ingredients for fertilizers used in agricultural food production. This case study follows the development of ElectroSan, a pre-revenue process engineering spinoff that focuses on novel processes for converting urine into valuable products. The two primary technologies ElectroSan uses to extract nitrogen from urine are ion exchange and electrochemical stripping. The efficacy of these technologies (primarily ion exchange) was investigated through field trials enabled by a partnership with Sanergy in Nairobi, Kenya. Through experimentation and market analyses, Dowex Mac 3 was identified as the most suitable resin for nitrogen recovery. Additionally, this process could produce ammonium sulfate fertilizer at a lower cost to competing products and also had the advantages of providing a steady, local supply of fertilizer that could be applied by fertigation. This approach thus avoided local ecosystem damage from improper disposal, created local economic opportunities, and partially closed the nutrient cycle locally. Life cycle and techno-economic assessments (in the context of San Francisco, CA) found that the sulfuric acid used for regeneration of the resin represented 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and energy input (embedded energy from the manufacturing process). Providing insights into the importance of partnerships, being adaptive with assumptions, and the realities of conducting fieldwork, the ElectroSan research project continues to explore the valorization of urine and has expanded to new contexts, including other parts of Kenya (with Sanivation) and Dakar, Senegal (with Delvic Sanitation Initiatives).
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
This chapter presents the Open Data Kit (ODK) project’s design, challenges, development, and evolution of configurable software frameworks and their international development impacts. The ODK project created a suite of mobile data collection tools designed to help organizations working in resource-constrained contexts collect, aggregate, and analyze data. ODK mobile tools are designed to maintain their functionality in locations with limited, intermittent, or no Internet connectivity. While the first set of ODK tools has experienced wide adoption with millions of users collecting data, its primary use case of unidirectional data flowing from the field to a central repository could not be adapted to certain use cases. To broaden the scope of potential applications, a second generation of tools was developed that added support for bidirectional data management applications. This chapter discusses the iterative research and development process of the ODK project.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
In any problem-solving endeavor, identifying the right problem and asking the right questions is at least half the challenge. A well-posed problem can suggest an obvious, effective solution, while a poorly chosen problem can lead to dead-end non-solutions that leave no one better off. In this chapter, we consider important questions that should be asked with respect to potential beneficiaries or collaborators, the larger context of a problem, the type of impact, approaches to scale, and ethical considerations.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
South Africa has one of the highest rates of youth unemployment and under-employment around the world, despite having a relatively large formal sector. This is driven, in part, by frictions in labor markets, including lack of information about job applicants’ skills, limited access to job training, and employers’ reliance on referrals through professional networks for hiring. This case study explores whether the online platform LinkedIn can be used to improve the employment outcomes of disadvantaged youth in South Africa. Researchers worked with an NGO, the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, to develop a training for young workseekers in the use of LinkedIn for job search, applications, and networking for referrals. This intervention was randomized across 30 cohorts of youth, with more than 1600 students enrolled in the study. The research team worked with LinkedIn engineers to access data generated by the platform. The evaluation finds that participants exposed to the LinkedIn training (the “treated” participants) were 10% more likely than the control group to find immediate employment, an effect that persisted for at least a year after job readiness training.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
Economic development can be driven by large, high-performing firms that provide safe, dignified jobs with living wages. The garment manufacturing industry is a large, economically important sector concentrated in low- and middle-income countries; however, it has been characterized by persistent neglect of workers’ concerns and working conditions. This case study explores whether digital communication platforms, combined with improvements in management, can empower garment factory workers to voice their concerns and have their grievances addressed. We describe a series of randomized experiments testing the effectiveness of different grievance reporting solutions, finding that access to an anonymous complaint service improves worker satisfaction and reduces absenteeism. However, these simple solutions do not adequately address issues around management trust, accountability, and quality. An ongoing experiment explores whether grievance reporting technology, combined with team-based performance incentives for management, can further improve outcomes for workers.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
This case study tells the story behind a research project on the economics of rural electrification in Western Kenya. The chapter covers (1) aspects of the policy and technology environment that initially guided the course of the work; (2) how the project pivoted away from solar microgrids and focused instead on the expansion of the national electricity grid; (3) unexpected challenges encountered while implementing a randomized evaluation of electricity infrastructure; (4) how we interpreted the study findings in light of consequential, concurrent changes to Kenya’s electrification policies; and (5) possible directions for further research, motivated by our project experience.
... The obvious way to avoid presumption is to engage deeply and continuously with potential beneficiaries -to understand what they want, what they are constrained by, what resources they have, what strengths they can build on, and what dreams they have for the future. Development engineers and, sometimes, their critics have therefore refined a host of approaches to the design of solutions informed by beneficiaries: participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993), cooperative design (Bodker & King, 2018), co-design (David et al., 2013;Ramachandran et al., 2007), participatory action research (Kemmis, 2006;Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998), community-based participatory design (Braa, 1996), ethnographic design (Blomberg et al., 2009), human-centered design (Putnam et al., 2016), user-centered design (Putnam et al., 2009), asset-based community development (Kretzmann & McKnight, 1996;Mathie & Cunningham, 2003), and so on. What underlies all such approaches is a respect for potential beneficiaries as people who deeply understand the problem context, who have their own creative talents, and whose buy-in is required for uptake, impact, and sustainability of the solution. ...
This case study looks at how the use of mobiles for transferring cash can make access to government subsidies more effective. The technological innovation of money transfer using mobile phones is made in the context of Niger, one of the lowest-ranked countries on the UN’s Human Development Index. Through the process of iterative implementation and collaboration across multiple stakeholders, the case study demonstrates how mobile money technology can reach the poor and help improve well-being.KeywordsMobile moneyCash transfersSub-Saharan AfricaIntra-household decision-makingDigital financial services
... Translation systems research will therefore benefit from direct user involvement, using techniques like participatory design (Muller and Kuhn, 1993;Schuler and Namioka, 1993) and value sensitive design (Friedman, 1996;Friedman et al., 2002). For example, we recruited 9 immigrants to the United States (4 men, 5 women) for a multi-day participatory design exercise. ...
... It is argued that using persona in user-centered design processes has excellent benefits [9]. Persona, as a technique for making users real for designers [10], is a type of "virtual" user creation and a representation based on experience and imagination, as the user is out of the loop during critical stages of design [11]. Persona development begins with assumptions about user profiles based on data from preliminary market research [12]. ...
Persona literature, which has rich content, has long been one of the dominant and popular topics in design. In the literature, which focuses on persona production and its use in the design process, there are hardly any ethical discussions about the philosophical principles of persona production. This article explains the general ethical approach to design practices and explores how persona creation and persona-based design practices can foster ethical thought and action. For this purpose, the scope of the concepts of persona and ethics is determined and defined. The idea of persona is discussed in terms of objectification, transformation, homogenization of individuals and obtaining individual data, legitimacy of representation, and use ethics.
... In effect, we treat one user as being a synecdochic representative of all users, and we treat one measurement on that user as being a metonymic indicator of all of the relevant attributes of that user and all users. Based on the above principles, we can consider many different methods to choose the representative user, such as statistics (Landauer 1997), grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990), political theory (Schuler and Namioka 1993), and design practice. Here, we develop two practical instantiation models: Statistical Stratified Sample (S 3 ) and Strategic Sampling for Diversity (SSD) models. ...
Finding a subset of users to statistically represent the original social network is a fundamental issue in Social Network Analysis (SNA). The problem has not been extensively studied in existing literature. In this paper, we present a formal definition of the problem of \textbf{sampling representative users} from social network. We propose two sampling models and theoretically prove their NP-hardness. To efficiently solve the two models, we present an efficient algorithm with provable approximation guarantees. Experimental results on two datasets show that the proposed models for sampling representative users significantly outperform (+6\%-23\% in terms of Precision@100) several alternative methods using authority or structure information only. The proposed algorithms are also effective in terms of time complexity. Only a few seconds are needed to sampling ~300 representative users from a network of 100,000 users.All data and codes are publicly available.
... Several fields of research explore the results of public participation in the early stages of the policy cycle. These include, among others, participatory design (Schuler and Namioka 1993), co-design (Sanders and Stappers 2008) and open design (Boisseau et al. 2018). Among them, more and more authors are interested in the "ideation" stage which we call here policy design (Ogilvie and Liedtka 2011;Ferretti et al. 2019). ...
More and more literature and practice recommend involving the public at the early stages of the policy cycle, i.e. issue identification, definition of the policy objectives and policy design. Policy design involves, among others, identifying solutions, ideas or alternatives which may address the policy objectives. Three main arguments are often put forward to advocate for the involvement of stakeholders, or the public, in policy design: a “user-centered” argument (i.e. for the policy to better meet people's priorities), an innovation argument (i.e. to conceive new solutions) and a collective argument (i.e. to identify collective actions and better tackle environmental problems). However, in both research and practice these arguments have been challenged. Research has insufficiently generated evidence of the influence of large-scale participation in policy design on resulting proposed actions. The objective of this paper is to analyze whether a large-scale participatory process leads to action proposals that fit people's priorities and that are innovative and collective. It draws from a land management and rural development policy design experiment conducted in six vulnerable areas of Tunisia. 4,300 direct participants were involved and 11,583 action proposals were collected. Our results highlight the influence of the local circumstances on innovation and the interest towards collective actions. Our results also show that whether policy design is made individually or in group influences the outcomes. The results also suggest that appropriate facilitation can help fostering more collective and innovative actions. We conclude the paper by opening up the idea of hybridizing policy design methods with methods from political and agricultural sciences in order to better understand the drivers and rationalities behind participants’ action proposals.
... However, an isolated process, where the design decisions are entirely made by the governing organizations, often does not completely satisfy the needs of the end-users Robertson and Simonsen (2012). Participatory design techniques address this problem by actively involving end-users in the design process so that the final end-product focuses on the needs and requirements of the users Schuler and Namioka (1993); Spinuzzi (2005). In general applications, such design methods are expected to satisfy the principles of including diverse stakeholder opinions in the design process and ensuring a balanced power dynamic between users and designers of the applications; we argue that a proper implementation of Representation Pact indeed follows these principles as well. ...
Elections are the central institution of democratic processes, and often the elected body -- in either public or private governance -- is a committee of individuals. To ensure the legitimacy of elected bodies, the electoral processes should guarantee that diverse groups are represented, in particular members of groups that are marginalized due to gender, ethnicity, or other socially salient attributes. To address this challenge of representation, we have designed a novel participatory electoral process coined the Representation Pact, implemented with the support of a computational system. That process explicitly enables voters to flexibly decide on representation criteria in a first round, and then lets them vote for candidates in a second round. After the two rounds, a counting method is applied, which selects the committee of candidates that maximizes the number of votes received in the second round, conditioned on satisfying the criteria provided in the first round. With the help of a detailed use case that applied this process in a primary election of 96 representatives in Switzerland, we explain how this method contributes to fairness in political elections by achieving a better "descriptive representation". Further, based on this use case, we identify lessons learnt that are applicable to participatory computational systems used in societal or political contexts. Good practices are identified and presented.
In this paper, we present the results of a participatory design research project conducted together with the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany. In this collaborative design research project, we set out to create new, location-independent ways of making museums more accessible and approachable to people who would or could not otherwise attend them, in particular those of younger age groups. We present three novel approaches that integrate diverse educational and participatory concepts into the museum visit. All are based on existing technology, allowing for easy and low-cost implementation through cultural institutions. These include a new way of discovering people with whom to attend the museum, a new way of contributing remotely to a collaborative exhibit and a new way of connecting school classes to prepare jointly for a visit to the museum, including a digital co-curation process. We explain our collaborative research and design process and present the results developed in exchange with our project partners and through input from participating users. We conclude by discussing our findings and by outlining future research opportunities.
This book chapter outlines different facets of Human-Centered Design, which evolved over half a century. These facets have different foundational influences that lead to design by, with, and for people. Designing for people, including Ergonomics and Human Factors and Interactions Design, originated from early developments in experimental psychology. Similarly, designing for people with specific needs emerged from developments in medicine and rehabilitation, which resulted in design approaches, such as Universal Design and Inclusive Design. Designing with people, including Participatory Design, developed from communal architecture. Designing by people is grounded in the psychology of creativity, resulting in design approaches, such as Creative Engineering and Design Thinking. Early developments in social psychology developed over time into Social Design and Design by Society. These approaches emerged as designers responded to socio-material and socio-economic challenges with new Human-Centered Design approaches. This book chapter aims to raise awareness of the contextual evolution of different Human-Centered Design approaches and the need to continuously respond creatively to these challenges with new design solutions and adequate design approaches.KeywordsHuman-centered designDesign approachHistoryEvolution
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