[community] Participatory Design Challenges

[Shahi, Sepideh]

Hi everyone,
I was at a lecture by Cosmin Munteanu from Tag Lab<http://taglab.utoronto.ca/>. His talk was mainly about the use of assistive technology and natural interactions for the aging population.
At the end of his talk he mentioned a few challenges that they have experienced with participatory design in their research and design projects, which I thought might be interesting for our community:

  *   The participatory design is not a good approach when there is a huge gap between what users know and what the research team knows; in other words when there are lot of mental steps from where the user is to where the researcher want the user to be, it’s better to use other approaches than participatory design.
  *   The other challenge that they had experienced was that many older adults had cognitive impairments, thus, they would easily forget what they had learned from the researchers or any personal customizations that they had made on an application. Thus, the researcher had to take them through the entire process again in each session, which was very exhausting for both the researcher and the user.

So, It would be interesting to discuss these challenges in our upcoming community meeting about Co-design and Convivial Design Tools on April 6th.


Thanks,

SEPIDEH SHAHI

INCLUSIVE DESIGNER
INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY

T: 416 977 6000 x3951
E: sshahi at ocadu.ca<mailto:sshahi at ocadu.ca>

www.ocadu.ca<http://www.ocadu.ca/>
www.idrc.ocad.ca<http://www.idrc.ocad.ca/>