Mini-project 3: Participatory design
Goal
The goal of this project is to give you an experiential sense of how participatory design works, how to create elicitation strategies for it, and the kinds of surprises that it can turn up. This project will be done in groups of two.
Overview
The key attribute of participatory design is that intended users/stakeholders and designers work together to create a design which does justice to the complexity of the users’ actual practices. Moreover, in PD all stakeholders are experts in their own domain, so we will use the term “user” and “expert” interchangeably. In this mini-project, you will practice this on a small/brief scale. You will form a team of two. One person will be designated “the designer”, the other “the expert.” The team will develop an original elicitation technique, use it to investigate a practice of the expert, and collaboratively sketch a technology design that is appropriate for that practice based on the insights that the elicitation techniques developed.
Good participatory design results in surprises – surprises to the designer about the nature of the activity to be designed for and what really matters in it, and surprises to the user with new realizations of what his or her activity is about and what it might be possible to create for it. For this project, you will document your design, describe how its features relate to details of user practice, and explain surprises that came up for you along the way.
Instructions
- In the (10/29) lecture of Module 4, we will form teams of two. In your team, decide who wants to be the ‘designer’ and who the ‘expert.’ Of course, many of you will say you’re not experts at anything, but you’re expert college students for sure! Think of it as “having expertise” if you don’t want to call yourself an expert. If you are not present in lecture on that day, you will need to find a friend who is willing to act as the ‘expert’ for you (this does not need to be a person in this class). If your friend is not in 4240, you must play the ‘designer’ role while your friend is the ‘user.’
- If you are working with another student in 4240, make sure to note the full name and the netID of your partner.
- Identify an activity that the expert regularly engages in for which you wish to design. The activity should be one about which the user feels s/he has expertise, and about which the designer knows little.
- After interviewing the user briefly about the activity, develop a hands-on, creative elicitation technique tailored to that activity which you will use to develop specific insights into and concrete details about that activity. You should start by brainstorming several techniques before settling on and fleshing out your chosen technique.
- The elicitation technique must support hands-on demonstration and explanation. Interviewing may be helpful to communicate background information but it does not count as a designed elicitation technique. Nor does guiding the designer through the activity. Elicitation techiques are invented new symbolic languages that prevent either party from dominating the dialog. For example:
- You might make paper models of key physical components of an activity, and work together to figure out if they need to be separate or could be combined in new ways.
- It may be helpful to design a structured role-play, for example to check understanding by having the designer pretend s/he is doing the activity and the user explaining when s/he has things wrong. But both parties should keep an eye out from when “wrong” may be redesigned.
- You might design a sketching activity to flesh out your discussion, for example by creating a collaborative comic strip that illustrates a key issue or aspect of the activity, then doing a second set of panels with a new approach.
- More ways will be covered in lecture and/or section.
- Remember that:
- Participatory design techniques are often physical, visual, and creative.
- They focus on reducing as much as possible the power differential between the designer and the person designed for. When an expert talks about their expertise both sides hear the same words, but the meaning is different. Elicitation techniques often give things new names so that both sides have to stop and think about what they are communicating.
- They should be specifically tailored to address the nuances of the task at hand. Doing drawings for a luthier may be less useful than an accoustic elicitation.
- By the section on 11/1, execute the elicitation technique you developed as part of a participatory design session. This process should take about 30 minutes but could take a bit longer if you are in the groove. Your goal here should be to collaboratively elicit as much detail as possible. You should both take notes to document your process and capture details of the activity that seem important, and note surprises that come up along the course of discussion. It might be helpful to take photographs of stages in the design process for your own notes or to include in your submission.
- Develop your design, by doing the following:
- Review the results of the discussion so far. What is striking or surprising about the activity, for the designer or for the now-sensitized user/expert? What mismatches seem to exist between currently existing technology and what your expert actually does?
- Using paper, markers, or other supplies, collaboratively develop a concept prototype for a technology that would contribute positively to this activity. Make sure both parties agree that this would be a desirable technology.
- Annotate the technology design with descriptions of how the design responds to specific details of the experts’s activity that came up in earlier discussions. We will provide time in our lecture slot on 10/26 to develop your project design, and in section on 10/27 to further understand MP3.
- After elicitation and design, each participant will write up his or her own brief experience report. This report will contain the following components:
- Your role in the process (expert or designer).
- Your partner’s full name.
- (200 words, with optional images) A detailed description of the elicitation technique you designed for the project.
- (400 words, with optional images) A description of how your technique worked out in practice, and what you learned about the user/expert’s activity you are designing for through it.
- (100-200 words) A description of the nature of any surprises that came up for you during the course of design and what you learned from them. Hint: if there were no surprises, you probably did something wrong.
- (700 words) A reflection explaining how and to what degree your team instantiated participatory design with specific references to the reading and class notes.
NB: Word counts are strict limits. Graders will stop reading the assignment when they are reached and points past that point will be counted.
To aid you in getting the miniproject done with minimal pain, we will devote section on 11/1 to starting to testing your elicitation technique against common pitfalls, and we will give you last-minute advice on how to transition from elicitation to design in section on 11/15. You will profit the most from this set up if you deploy the elicitation techniques prior 11/1. As with all design techniques in this class, iteration is profitable and expected.
Submission
Deliverables:
- The group submission should be photograph/scan of your annotated technology sketch (i.e. the designed prototype, with annotations stating clearly how each design feature relates to a specific thing that you learned through your elicitation process). This submission is the same for both partners on your team and only needs to be submitted by one of you. Make sure you agree on who is uploading it, and obviously put both your netids on it!
- Your individual experience report, as detailed above. Each student will need to write and submit their report separately. This is where the elicitation process is described, from your perspective. If you are working with a expert outside of this class, the outsider does not need to submit a report.
Please pay attention to word counts in both sections!
Your project is due electronically via submission to Canvas by 11:59pm on Friday, Friday, Nov 15. Your submissions must be in .pdf format (you can print your design image to pdf to produce this). Passages beyond the word limits will not be counted toward the assignment.