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Past Experiences and Recent Challenges in Participatory Design Research
Abstract
In 1987, I went to a conference on a rather remote farm in a rather remote corner of Finland. Here, most of the Scandinavian information systems and human-computer interaction community was gathered among Finnish lakes and smoke saunas. I had recently finished my Ph.D. thesis, which would later be published internationally (Bødker, 1991). This thesis helped set the scene for what came to be known as second-generation human-computer interaction (HCI). I came to this topic with a background in early Scandinavian participatory design. My sources of theoretical inspiration were, among others, Leont'ev, whose works I had learned about from Danish colleagues in psychology - Henrik Poulsen, Jens Mammen, Klaus Bærentsen, Mariane Hedegaard, and others. Other sources included the recently published books of Winograd and Flores (1986), and Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986), which served as vehicles for a joint study circle between psychology and computer science. In two essays (Bannon & Bødker, 1991; Bertelsen & Bødker, 2002a), we summarized the state of our concerns at the time: Many of the early advanced user interfaces assumed that the users were the designers themselves, and accordingly built on an assumption of a generic user, without concern for qualifications, work environment, division of work, and so on In validating findings and designs, there was a heavy focus on novice users, whereas everyday use by experienced users and concerns for the development of expertise were hardly addressed. Detailed task analysis was seen as the starting point for most user interface design, whereas much of the Scandinavian research had pointed out how limited explicit task descriptions were for capturing actual actions and conditions for these in use (Ehn & Kyng, 1984). The idealized models created through task analysis failed to capture the complexity and contingency of real-life action. […]
... In studies of HCI, Bødker (1987) took up activity theory as a framework for underpinning her work in participatory design (see Bødker 2009 for a retrospective; see Spinuzzi 2002Spinuzzi , 2005a for a history). In this approach, computer scientists and workers collaborated in developing new computer systems to better support the workers' labor (e.g., Bødker et al. 1987). ...
... DWR and PD have many similarities, leading Bødker to draw heavily on Engeström's framework once she found out about it in 1987 (Bødker 2009;Bødker & Grønbaek 1996;Bødker et al. 2017). Yet they have differences as well (Bødker 2009;Bødker & Klokmose 2011). ...
... DWR and PD have many similarities, leading Bødker to draw heavily on Engeström's framework once she found out about it in 1987 (Bødker 2009;Bødker & Grønbaek 1996;Bødker et al. 2017). Yet they have differences as well (Bødker 2009;Bødker & Klokmose 2011). ...
In the 1980s, Yrjö Engeström took up Leontiev’s activity theory, extending and modifying it extensively to apply it to learning in organizations. Whereas the work of Vygotsky and Leontiev represented a cultural psychology, this “third-generation” activity theory (3GAT) was arguably closer to an organizational sociology. This organizational sociology is specifically oriented to interventionist research: i.e., the consensus-driven codesign of systems of collective action. This underdiscussed orientation explains 3GAT’s descriptive organizational modeling and triangle heuristic. Understanding this orientation is crucial for understanding how 2GAT was translated into 3GAT, as well as how a 4GAT might emerge in turn.
... The urge to appreciate the complexity of archaeological evidence (Wylie & Chapman, 2015) should be extended to ar-chaeological information work as well. It is conceivable that even if explicit task descriptions can have analytical relevance also in the context of archaeology, there are limitations in how well they can capture the complexity and eventualities of actual actions and their conditions (as in Bødker, 2009). Instead of being steered by explicit procedures -even if there has been a desire to describe and define workflows -the reading of documents, first-hand observations and social information are guided by the scaffolding (Wylie & Chapman, 2015;Chapman & Wylie, 2016;Wylie, 2018) of pre-understandings, or "enormously diverse range of background knowledge and technical resources that inform their use of surviving material traces as evidence." ...
... Paraphrasing Goguen (1997), the relations of how different genres become accountable in relation to social settings and other genres, are not predetermined but depend on the constellation of what is appropriated, when, where, how and by whom. Being a knotwork of genres that scaffold (Wylie, 2018) each other, it is not surprising that it resists being reduced to simplified procedural workflows (Bødker, 2009;Huvila, 2018). This is also what makes situational appropriation difficult to explicate and the knowledge that plays out in the process as 'tacit'. ...
Purpose
Information science research has begun to broaden its traditional focus on information seeking to cover other modes of acquiring information. The purpose of this paper is to move forward on this trajectory and to present a framework for explicating how in addition to being sought, existing information are made useful and taken into use.
Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual enquiry draws on an empirical vignette based on an observation study of an archaeological teaching excavation. The conceptual perspective builds on Andersen’s genre approach and Huvila’s notion of situational appropriation.
Findings
This paper suggests that information becomes appropriable, and appropriated (i.e. taken into use), when informational and social genres intertwine with each other. This happens in a continuous process of (re)appropriation of information where existing information scaffolds new information and the on-going process of appropriation.
Originality/value
The approach is proposed as a potentially powerful conceptualisation for explicating information interactions when existing information is taken into use rather than sought that have received little attention in traditional models and theories of human information behaviour.
... A reoccurring observation in the studies of information and work has been that tasks and work as a whole are difficult to describe in high enough granularity to be comprehensible for someone who is not skilled in that particular practice (Bødker, 2009). At the same time, the proficient insiders themselves can have difficulties to explain what they do and how they know (Bouwman et al., 1987;Ciborra and Lanzara, 1994). ...
Purpose
Sharing information about work processes has proven to be difficult. This applies especially to information shared from those who participate in a process to those who remain outsiders. The purpose of this article is to increase understanding of how professionals document their work practices with a focus on information making by analysing how archaeologists document their information work in archaeological reports.
Design/methodology/approach
In total 47 Swedish archaeological reports published in 2018 were analysed using close reading and constant comparative categorisation.
Findings
Even if explicit narratives of methods and work process have particular significance as documentation of information making, the evidence of information making is spread out all over the report document in (1) procedural narratives, (2) descriptions of methods and tools, (3) actors and actants, (4) photographs, (5) information sources, (6) diagrams and drawings and (7) outcomes. The usability of reports as conveyors of information on information making depends more on how a forthcoming reader can live with it as a whole rather than how to learn of the details it recites.
Research limitations/implications
The study is based on a limited number of documents representing one country and one scholarly and professional field.
Practical implications
Increased focus on the internal coherence of documentation and the complementarity of different types of descriptions could improve information sharing. Further, descriptions of concepts that refer to work activities and the situation when information came into being could similarly improve their usability.
Originality/value
There is little earlier research on how professionals and academics document and describe their information activities.
... Our interest in elaborating these matters is to inquire and probe into some of the contemporary strategies found useful for situated and participatory perspectives on design. We follow recent developments within design research that aim to develop and understand strategies of participation for mundane contexts that extend beyond and around workplaces and organizations into everyday life (Bødker, 2009;Hagen and Robertson, 2010), public spheres (Botero and Saad-Sulonen, 2010;Björgvinsson et al., 2012), the emergence of publics (Lindström and Ståhl, 2014), the weaving of communities and publics (Meroni, 2007;Di-Salvo et al., 2012), and commons Teli, 2015). In order to continue developing this research path and agenda, we want to pay particular attention to contemporary strategizing practices that are used in citizens' initiatives to articulate their concerns and what they care about. ...
In this article we explore some emerging strategizing practices that citizens use for the development of their immediate urban fabric. We make use of our experiences and engagements with two citizen-driven initiatives in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The first case attempts to rethink uses and actors of public space by creating viable conditions for the emergence of urban gardening in public spaces. The second initiative is engaged in a political discussion of the boundaries of participation, cultural appropriation and ownership of city space. We discuss and reflectively analyze some of their strategizing practices, as forms of infrastructuring, commoning and patchworking. The cases shed light on forms of designing that are enacted collectively through mobilizing particular concerns and caring approaches. We conclude by highlighting aspects made visible in the cases that can give a sense of direction for exercising forms of continuous, open-ended design that are attentive to the collective construction of Things.
... (p. 309) Like Engeström (2009), others have seen challenges to 3GAT in how knowledge work is organized (Bodker, 2009;Lompscher, 2006;Ruckriem, 2009). For instance, Yamazumi (2009, p. 212) argued that the knowledge society has shifted from mass production to interorganizational collaboration (cf. ...
Mobile professionals can choose to work in offices, executive suites, home offices, or other spaces. But some have instead chosen to work at coworking spaces: open-plan office environments in which they work alongside other unaffiliated professionals for a fee of approximately $250 a month. But what service are they actually purchasing with that monthly fee? How do they describe that service? From an activity theory perspective, what are its object, outcome, and actors? This article reports on a 20-month study that answers such questions.
... Technological ecologies: even in the workplace, workers are seldom restricted to single workstations, but use a range of technologies with overlapping functionalities, in different places and contexts of use (Bødker;. Typically, devices and applications are increasingly networked, linking to other applications and devices. ...
This paper takes as its starting point Kyng's (2010) challenges for future participatory design practices in the context of a technology landscape which has changed enormously since the emergence of both 'Scandinavian' PD and the participatory politics of 1960s US radicalism. We describe the Infinite Bandwidth, Zero Latency (IBZL)) project, from its use of the 'Imagine' workshop method to envisage potential technological futures, through to its involvement of stakeholder representatives and potential users in assessing one such vision of potential technological 'futures', the 'real avatar". IBZL was originally conceived as an intervention in policy debates in the UK about the significance and potential of 'next generation' or 'superfast' broadband networks, and as a way of mobilizing wider audiences to consider the possibility of innovative applications of them. By their very nature, the significance of these networks transcends particular workplaces. This case study describes responses to several of the challenges for PD practice raised by Kyng, including the roles of companies, intellectual property, funding, the involvement of social actors as users, the engagement of users in multiple roles.
Background:
Design dynamics that evolve during a designer's prototyping process encapsulate important insights about the way the designer is using his or her knowledge, creativity, and reflective thinking. Nevertheless, the capturing of such dynamics is not always an easy task, as they are built through alternations between the self-first and self-third person views.
Objective:
This study aimed at introducing a conceptual framework, namely 2D-ME, to provide an explainable domain that could express the dynamics across the design timeline during a prototyping process of serious games.
Methods:
Within the 2D-ME framework, the Technological-Pedagogical-Content Knowledge (TPACK), its adaptation to the serious games (TPACK-Game), and the activity theory frameworks were combined to produce dynamic constructs that incorporate self-first and self-third person extension of the TPACK-Game to Games TPACK, rules, division of labor, and object. The dynamic interplay between such constructs was used as an adaptation engine within an optimization prototype process, so each sequential version of the latter could converge to the designer's initial idea of the serious game. Moreover, higher-order thinking is scaffolded with the internal Activity Interview Script proposed in this paper.
Results:
An experimental case study of the application of the 2D-ME conceptual framework in the design of a light reflection game was showcased, revealing all the designer's dynamics, both from internal (via a diary) and external (via the prototype version) views. The findings of this case study exemplified the convergence of the prototyping process to an optimized output, by minimizing the mean square error between the conceptual (initial and updated) idea of the prototype, following explainable and tangible constructs within the 2D-ME framework.
Conclusions:
The generic structure of the proposed 2D-ME framework allows its transferability to various levels of expertise in serious games mastering, and it is used both for the designer's process exploration and training of the novice ones.
We draw on Engeström’s (2011a) formative intervention approach to bring together mentor teachers and university supervisors to construct a tool for structuring observations and mentoring student teachers. Data include videos and transcripts from seven meetings where participants discussed mentoring and viewed video records of teaching practice to articulate problems and solutions. We examine how video afforded opportunities for participants to precisely describe problems of practice, to develop a shared vision and language of ambitious instruction, and to collectively construct frameworks to guide their work. Findings have implications for design of professional development for teacher educators and programs of teacher preparation.
This paper reports on an exploratory participatory design process aimed at supporting citizen deliberation in municipal planning. It presents the main outcomes of this process in terms of selected prototypes and an approach to the use setting. We support and discuss different ways for citizens to act and reflect on proposed plans: in-situ, while physically close to the planning object, and ex-situ, when citizens are remote from this. The support of in-situ and ex-situ participation allows citizens to engage in continuous reflection-in and on-action as a collaborative activity with other citizens, hereby inspiring citizens to increase their democratic engagement.
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