Thanks for dropping by! This blog is the documentation of my exploration into the potential of harnessing collective intelligence in the design process to better understand how design can play a more meaningful role in social development work by engaging local communities in the process. The process that I'm sharing with you is conducted as part of my Master of Design in Interdisciplinary Design Studies at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada. I will be updating this blog with fresh content a few times per week to walk you through the process of my thesis. I'll be sharing the literature that I'm studying, research that I'm conducting, contacts I'm developing, and conclusions I'm drawing. I hope to share a better understanding of the role information communication technologies for development (ICT4D) play within design processes to better engage beneficiares of development work. The topics that I will be exploring include crowd-sourcing in a low-technology context, wisdom of the crowds, rural appraisal techniques, and the role of design in international development; an issue growing in significance as we look to apply design thinking to significant societal challenges. I hope you enjoy what you find on here, and feel free to join the conversation! Cheers, Michael
Leveraging Collective Intelligence in Participatory Design Research: A Thesis
(download)
The defense of my thesis wrapped up in August 2013, and I'm happy to report it went through with honours. Apparently, I have now mastered Design, whoulda thought...
While I've tried to keep this bad boy fairly active over the past couple years throughout that entire process, this in many ways represents a closure to the academic journey of all that work.
With that, I'd like to share two versions of the culmination of my research - a big. bad, thesis. The above image will hook you up with a download of a condensed and visually friendly pdf of what this was all about.
If you're interested in seeing the thesis in its entirety (and much more boring format due to rigid academic requirements) then please feel free to take a look here. As always, share away, provide feedback, and keep the conversation going.
I've had the incredible good fortune to now begin to apply aspects of this research on a multitude of projects ranging from healthcare to municipal politics. Now with the academic chapter closed, looking forward to showing where this is ending up in the real world.
Design and government is akin to oil and water. Everyone knows that and the worlds couldn’t be further apart. Government will never understand the value or importance of design, and design is forced to squeak out an existence in spite of the government’s best bumbling efforts to keep it down. Right?
On November 11th - a rainy Monday night in the Nation’s capital - we packed a pub with designers and public servants to let the fists and barbs fly — except they didn’t. Instead, we challenged that notion and were witness to a lively discussion that was a first of its kind on a large scale in Ottawa on the intersection of design, policy, and government.
With mounting examples springing up around the world of progressive governments embedding human-centred design principles into the core of their service offering, citizen engagement and policy forming, DesignMeets…Public Policy shed light on the Canadian state of affairs.
With a strong cast of speakers, the night was moderated by HUB Ottawa’s Executive Director — Vinod Rajasekaran — and quickly became an accurate representation of the passion, frustration, and optimism surrounding this space in the Canadian context. Participants and attendees came from a massive breadth of backgrounds, and found graphic designers rubbing shoulders with policy analysts.
Getting things kicked off was none other than the Web Usability Lead for the Government of Canada. As part of a growing movement of user-centred design practitioners in government, Laura had essentially been working in secrecy on creating the open-source web experience toolkit in order to improve information and services delivered to the public. She shared the process that went into creating it, solicited feedback for crowd ideas on what government could become, and future thoughts on creating a stronger design presence within government.
Dom Saul
Dom of Akendi took off the kid gloves and brought a fresh and honest spin to the evening supported by a backdrop of kitten after kitten. Key takeaways are that design is not a democratic process. Design by committee and design by consensus don’t work.
Mary Herbert-Copley
Mary pulled on over 25 years experience within the government to deliver a talk that did a great job of providing evidence for where we’ve been, and where we’re going in the space. Her current work with the Canadian Council on Social Development as well as her notion of forming “collaboratories” - as an evolution from labs – to solve complex social problems proved inspirational by seeing a veteran of the public service still striving to innovate and reimagine engagement.
Erin Gee
Erin represented the energetic and inspired new face of public service. She’s tired of the status quo and is taking it into her own hands to identify pain points and ultimately make change. In her upcoming design jam with public servants she is imploring the government to become more comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Blaise Hebert
Policy Horizons Canada is tasked with generating foresight and knowledge in the public service and Blaise shared the fundamentals of foresight and the potential future implications of a policy direction. His ability to simplify “looking into the future” while turning foresight into something you can use represented the significant scope of this conversation on design and policy.
Jess McMullin
Jess’ wealth of experience in the design and policy sphere with The Centre for Citizen Experience was evident with many enlightening comments including the fundamental realization that policy making itself is a design process and decision DNA. While design is playing a larger role in social change, when you want to make change in organizations, you’re going to have to go deep enough to run into policy.
The main takeaways from the night as we prepare for the Toronto edition of DesignMeets…Public Policy was that it seems we’ve reached a critical mass of awareness and enthusiasm to form a working group comprised of individuals both within and outside of government to further user-centred design for public good. Whether it’s mandated by the government or not, design shouldn’t be subject to the constraints government can impose that for a host of reasons frequently don’t have the citizen’s best interests in mind. While design must understand the context within which it hopes to make change, there is a simmering movement of like-minded people ready to elevate this conversation to the next chapter.
On November 26th, Pivot Design Group and their friends are organizing the Toronto edition of DesignMeets Public Policy. Can't wait to head down there and keep the convo going.
DesignMeets...Public Policy - A discussion on design's role in Canadian society and government
Around the world, progressive governments are embedding design principles in the foundations of their public policy and service delivery. Design-led approaches are being recognized for bringing citizen-centred perspectives and innovation to complex government challenges. While examples are mounting of how design is being used to help build a stronger economy and improve everyday life, what’s happening in Canada?
A little over a year ago I had the good fortune of organizing a DesignMeets event in town focused on the emerging nature of designers as entrepreneurs. This time, I couldn't think of a more timely discussion.
On November 11th, DesignMeets will shed light on how our cities and country are — or could be — using design as a process to drive innovation from informing public policy to improving government service delivery. With events in Ottawa and Toronto, we hope to take a progressive step towards better understanding, and ultimately engaging in furthering design’s role in government.
Broadly, Ottawa's approach to the event will focus more on a macro-federal level while Toronto's two weeks later will dive deeper into the micro-municipal level.
This event is of particular personal significance given a change in my stance on the opportunities that exist in Ottawa and Canada for designers engaged in strategy and research on a big scale. In this country, we're currently seeing a growing appetite, appreciation, and literacy around the role of design in society and I want to bring together like-minded people to see what's currently happening and what opportunities lie on the near-horizon.
Event details are here, and hope to see you there, whether in Ottawa or Toronto!
By the way, huge shoutout for the fantastic illustration above put together by Naomi Khun - a graphic designer working within the government at Policy Horizons Canada.
Well here it is, the video (trailer in this case) of my talk at February's Design Indaba conference in Cape Town. From Harlem Shake to Idle No More, it's all in there in just under 7 minutes. A few things I learned...
1) Apparently I speak about 11 times faster than I thought I did (not to mention a fewe too many unfortunate uhh's)
2) An opportunity like this really was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of deal. No cliche.
3) Public speaking goes so far beyond being able to communicate confidently and not being shy in front of a crowd. It's story-telling, it's humour, it's personality, it's a balance of confidence and humility, and so much more... Definitely an art that I hope to learn and practice a lot more.
To see the presentation in its entirety, feel free to wander over here.
In the year and a half this blog has been active, it’s documented the process of a designer-turned-grad student passing through the cycles of research, discovery, insight, naivety, despair, and hope so familiar to anyone pursuing specialization in advanced education. While the academic portion of this story nears an end with a thesis defense on the early September horizon, the recent experience of presenting at IASDR 2013 in Japan serves as a key point of reflection looking back on what has become of this journey.
I had the opportunity to present a paper “When Designers Don’t Know: Collective Intelligence in Participatory Design for Development”; a paper that represented the foundation and motivation for research that occurred during the course of my Master’s work. Not only did this paper result in a sweet fridge-worthy certificate, but also a chance to share the theoretical underpinning for the reason I pursued graduate studies in the first place. IASDR 2013 turned out not only to be a chance to spread my excitement and optimism for my research topic to an international audience, but also face some refreshing academic heckling.
In an experience that was admittedly a little nerve-wracking, after I polished off my talk that feels so familiar by now about many of the topics found throughout this blog in front of a crowd of academic peers, I was faced with some rather blunt feedback from an enthusiastic if not a little lowbrow fellow attendee. Quite simply, he said “It’s not going to work…” and he definitely meant it.
Not the words you’d necessarily expect to hear given the general optimism around the topics of participatory design and collective intelligence, but for those reasons an absolute breath of fresh air. While not articulated well enough to act as constructive or helpful criticism, the comment and ensuing fragmented back-and-forth (believe it or not, I also don’t think that crowds of anonymous ordinary people designing aircraft landing gear is a good idea…) proved that this is a topic with some teeth. Any topic that encourages entrenched and stubborn opinions to surface means it’s one worth caring about, better articulating, and understanding. What initially instinctively felt like an attack against my work quickly evolved into motivation to push the topic further, dig deeper, and help clarify what’s still clearly a bit of a murky discussion that’s desperate to come down from the clouds.
Throughout my research, my main goal was to do just that - aggregate leading theory, perspectives and experiences into actionable guidelines and applications to advance beyond the promise of a digital age in design towards living and practising it. While grad studies might be nearing an end, the experiences, perspectives, and knowledge I’ve managed to pick up in the process have set me up to keep the ball rolling towards a better understanding of how to harness digital collective intelligence within participatory design. Thankfully I'm not alone in this optimism, and have picked up a first contract geared towards identifying opportunities and employing these approaches with the UX design firm Macadamian.
After all, in my humble opinion, not only will these topics of research work (and already are), but a design world that embraces digital participation will not only dramatically change the way design processes are conducted, but will also fundamentally challenge designer’s roles in new emerging systems for social problem solving. So, stay tuned for all that...
The literature review described in the three previous posts served to gather leading theory and knowledge from the three identified fields of research: participatory design, collective intelligence, ICT4D. The next step was to layer academic theory with practice.
THESE ARE SOME OF THE LEADING THINKERS AND PRACTITIONERS AT THE FOREFRONT OF A CHANGING DESIGN LANDSCAPE.
Their experiences and perspectives were combined with leading academic theory to create a rich understanding of how ICT’s can be used to leverage a community’s collective intelligence in participatory design, both theoretically and in practice.
While many people were engaged throughout the research, specific interview participants were identified based on the relevancy of their work and their experience within the fields of research. They were from three different firms, which were profiled in a previous post.
A series of open-ended interviews were conducted with these participants. These interviews probed deeper into the topics and began to forge the necessary interdisciplinary relationships to result in a more cohesive perspective on the topics. Turning the interview results into data followed a traditional Code, Concept, Category process described below.
This process was applied to over 250 minutes of audio recording, and 10,500 words of transcribed data.
Upon coding and analyzing the interview results, a set of patterns emerged which formed the foundation of a unified theory. This unified theory, when combined with leading academic theory was the basis of the data used in the creation of a set of guidelines for achieving collective intelligence in participatory design using ICT's. The next post will highlight the key findings and the foundation of the devleoped guidelines.
The final defined field of research bridging participatory design with collective intelligence is information communication technology (ICT) for development. ICT's are a term used to describe the various technologies of communication, and as a result, are the link necessary to enable collective intelligence within participatory design.
Information communication and social technologies (such as Twitter) are rewriting traditional models of engagement in design and development. While social and physical barriers to participation are lowering, or in many cases disappearing, newly networked communities are becoming empowered with a voice the world can hear.
THE FOUNDATIONS AND ASSUMPTIONS OF INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ARE CHANGING. THE TOOLS FOR A DIGITAL ECONOMY ARE NOW IN THE HANDS OF THE WORLD'S POOR. OUR VIEW OF THEM CAN START TO MIGRATE: FROM SEEING THEM AS VICTIMS TO SEEING THEM FIRST AS CONSUMERS, THEN PRODUCERS, THEN INNOVATORS IN A DIGITAL AGE.
Richard Heeks - Development 2.0: The IT-Enabled Transformation of International Development
Of particular impact in the developing world is the mobile phone, which is an incredibly accessible technology capable of enabling greater participation among lower stratas of the population who are often beneficiaries of development processes. These technologies are empowering those at the heart of challenges to participate in and influence development initiatives.
THESE SOCIAL NETWORKS AND WEB 2.0 TECHNOLOGIES PROVIDE OPPORTUNITIES FOR DESIGNING TO BE SHARED AMONG LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE, EXTENDING BEYOND THE DESIGNATED DESIGN TEAM; OPPORTUNITIES FOR COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE AND THEREFORE, COLLECTIVE DESIGN.
Mary Lou Maher, Mercedes Paulini, Paul Murty - Scaling Up: From Individual Design to Collaborative Design to Collective Design
ICT’s are the key to achieving collective intelligence within participatory design. By better understanding how to create the conditions for collective intelligence by motivating, sustaining, and managing distributed digital participation, design can evolve its processes to embrace the behaviour of an increasingly networked society.
The next series of posts will highlight the results of interviews conducted with leading practitioners operating in a new participatory design and development landscape. Their contributions to the research were necessary in order to provide an "on-the-ground" practitioners perspective to layer with existing leading theory.
From Cape Town to Tokyo, 2013 is shaping up to be a far-flung travel and talking year. I'm happy and proud to report that I'll be presenting a paper at the biennial International Congress of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR... I know, a crazy mouthful) 2013 edition in Tokyo, Aug 26-30.
The theme of the Congress is "Consilience and Innovation in Design" and is held by the Japanese Society for the Science of Design, and the Japan Society of Kansei Engineering with joint sponsorship of the Science Council of Japan, the Korean Society of Design Science, Chinese Institute of Design, Design Research Society, and Design Society. Sadly, I didn't know what consilience meant til I found this "the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" to strong conclusions.". This year's event is the fifth incarnation of the Congress, and previous host cities include Delft, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Yunlin.
Safe to say this will be pretty much the exact opposite of my experience at Design Indaba, and is very much an academic design gathering in front of much smaller and discerning crowds of design researchers.
The paper that I am presenting is one that that laid the groundwork for my research. I'll happily post the paper in its entirety post-conference, but for now the abstract is as follows...
When Designers Don't Know: Collective Intelligence in Participatory Design for Development
Design is in the midst of undergoing momentous changes as mass citizen engagement enabled by networked technologies is positioned to fundamentally alter participation in design processes. With design's increasingly prominent role in human development, it must address how to best engage existing diverse knowledge and evolve beyond traditional approaches in order to solve non-traditional and highly complex problems. The notion of leveraging collective intelligence using networked technologies in participatory processes represents great promise, yet its potential must be better understood in an emerging design landscape.
This paper will explore the emergence of participatory approaches in design and development, as well asleadingtheory on collective intelligence as a viable concept to strengthen design processes in human development initiatives. It will also shed light on the resulting impact on individual designers, and their role within a new design landscape where networked technologies are eroding barriers to participation.
As the second field of research under study, collective intelligence builds off of participatory design by extrapolating what the effects of participation in design can be for design cognition and performance. While participatory approaches to design and development are being hailed as ways of generating rich, meaningful and empowered knowledge from within a community, it is the effective harnessing of collective intelligence that stands to dramatically strengthen these participatory initiatives in unprecedented ways.
"THE EMPHASIS NEEDS TO BE ON TAPPING INTO EXISTING LOCAL KNOWLEDGE AND TALENT - INDIVIDUALS WHO LIVE AND EXPERIENCE THE PROBLEMS DAILY."
Victor Papanek - Design for the Real World
By creating the right conditions to aggregate the existing broad and varied knowledge within a community, it is possible to achieve a collective intelligence that is greater than that of any experts within the group.
"IN MANY CONTEXTS IT HAS BEEN FOUND THAT THE VALUE OF EXPERTISE TENDS TO BE OVERRATED... UNDER THE RIGHT CONDITIONS GROUPS ARE INCREDIBLY SMART, AND OFTEN SMARTER THAN THE SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THEM."
James Surowiecki - The Wisdom of the Crowds
While there is evidence that collective intelligence is at least partly responsible for favourable outcomes in participatory design, we still haven’t fully understood how to employ this cognitive potential. It is apparent though that by employing a collective and participatory approach that engages a broad spectrum of people including experts, design can hope to achieve unprecedented development impact.
"THE INTERNET PROVIDES THE PERFECT TECHNOLOGICAL PLATFORM CAPABLE OF AGGREGATING MILLIONS OF INDEPENDENT IDEAS AND MAGNIFYING DESIGN COGNITION."
Daren Brabham - Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving
Participatory design established the need for greater participation by beneficiaries in design projects. Collective intelligence provides further support for a facilitated design project with mass participation being capable of outperforming traditional design experts under the right conditions. The next post will touch on the necessary tools for enabling collective intelligence within participatory design.
The focus of this research deals with the intersection of three distinct, yet increasingly overlapping fields who are rich in theory and indisputable promise.
However, due to their emerging nature, these contemporary fields tend to lack evidence and practical examples of their actual impact. This research sought to advance their conceptual promise towards implementable action by unifying leading theory.
A NEED EXISTS FOR A UNIFIED INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE THAT COMBINES THE BEST OF EXISTING THEORY WITH EXPERIENCE FROM LEADING PRACTITIONERS.
Initial work at building a base of knowledge from which an emergent unified theory can emerge looked at leading classical and contemporary literature. The first field we will look at is participatory design.
Design, like much of society tends to operate in an expert mindset, where the expert’s opinion is highly valued and sought after. While expert contributions are incredibly valuable in a design project, in participatory design the role of the expert shifts towards that of an enabler and facilitator of participation by non-experts and non-designers.
"TRADITIONAL DESIGN PROCESSES HAVE DIFFICULTY ADDRESSING THE SCALE OR THE COMPLEXITY OF THE CHALLENGES WE NOW FACE."
Liz Sanders & Pieter Jan Stappers - Co-Creation and the New Landscapes of Design
Participatory design is a shift from traditional design processes where trained researchers and designers interviewed or observed largely passive users only to relay their opinions and experiences. It is an approach in which users and other stakeholders employ their knowledge and experience while working with designers.
"THE ABILITY TO DESIGN IS PART OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, WHICH IS A NATURAL ABILITY WIDESPREAD AMONG THE POPULATION."
Nigel Cross - Designerly Ways of Knowing
By engaging local non-experts in design processes, under the right conditions the likelihood of a project’s success increases. This is not only as a result of learning and applying local tacit knowledge that is difficult for biased outsiders to gain, but also due to increased emotional durability and attachment in a project’s outcome.
"WE NEED TO INVENT A NEW AND RADICAL FORM OF COLLABORATION THAT BLURS THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN CREATORS AND CONSUMERS. IT'S NOT ABOUT 'US VERSUS THEM' OR EVEN 'US ON BEHALF OF THEM'. FOR THE DESIGN THINKER, IT HAS TO BE 'US WITH THEM'."
Tim Brown - Change by Design
Participatory design - the enlisting and collaboration of many participants in design - is at the very core of this research. While it has been practised since the 1970's, the concept has taken on greater significance of late due to technological advancements enabling participation in unprecedented ways.
The next post will discuss the notion of collective intelligence, and what the implications of this are on participatory design.
As my research winds down, and I gear up for the final preparatory stages of a Master's thesis defense, I've compiled the work I've done over the past year and a half in a report that I'll be sharing pieces of over the next series of posts. At the conclusion, I'll make it available in its entirety for download and sharing.
This report is a condensed summary of a Master of Design study into leveraging digitally enabled collective intelligence in participatory design. It documents the processes undertaken for the development and deployment of a set of comprehensive guidelines aimed at informing practitioners working at the emerging boundaries of design collaboration spanning the digital and physical worlds.
It's relevant to those engaged and interested in...
The justification and need for this research addresses a few emerging themes...
DESIGN IS PLAYING AN INCREASINGLY LARGER ROLE IN DEVELOPMENT
While development had long ignored design as a discipline with which to engage, its human-centred innovative approaches have made it an increasingly appealing ally for addressing ever-complex development challenges. Design is being recognized beyond its ability to create innovative consumer products, and is instead seen as a process capable of eliciting radical change, whether it’s with products, services, systems or environments. As a result, the fields of development and design are forming interdisciplinary approaches in the hopes of solving complex social challenges in new non-traditional ways.
TO ADDRESS COMPLEX CHALLENGES, DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT APPROACHES ARE BECOMING INCREASINGLY PARTICIPATORY
Participatory approaches are methods of engaging local knowledge and talent that is traditionally difficult for outsiders to interpret and learn. These approaches are increasingly being used to get past the bias external ‘experts’ often bring to development challenges while empowering local participants and making best use of culturally specific tacit knowledge.
INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES ARE ENABLING LARGE-SCALE PARTICIPATION
The advancement and rapid diffusion of ICT’s such as mobile phones and social technologies enables the digital participation of many who were previously unreachable and voiceless in development work. The tools for development are increasingly in the hands of development beneficiaries, enabling an evolution from being passive recipients to active contributors in development interventions. For design, it means it now has the ability to leverage the diverse knowledge of vast groups of networked people in its participatory processes.
DIGITAL PARTICIPATION IN DESIGN CAN RESULT IN HIGHER-ORDER COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE
By engaging a large number of diverse participants in participatory design, the promise of achieving a collective intelligence that surpasses the cognitive ability of individual expertise becomes possible. For development work to advance beyond its current often-maligned level of impact, the promise of using ICT’s to enlist the collective intelligence of a community at the heart of development challenges is an approach that while still not entirely understood, holds incredible promise.
The aim of this research is to extend design’s capabilities through the use of ICT's and increased participation in order to achieve a higher-order collective intelligence in participatory design.
The main question this research sought to address was
HOW CAN ICT AND SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES BE USED TO LEVERAGE A COMMUNITY’S COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE IN PARTICIPATORY DESIGN?
Over the course of the next several posts, I'll share the process that I took to find answers.
Succinctly refining complex concepts into easily interpretable diagrams quickly became a fundamental component of this project. After all, what good is research if no one understands it... Also, what good is research if it requires someone reading a 100+ page thesis to get something out of it? What I'm working on is communicating my process and results in an easy-to-read, enjoyable, and easily distributed format. Basically, reducing nearly two years of research and mostly words into a portfolio piece.
That being said, the above diagram illustrates the space this research occupies in reference to existing fields of development and design.
You can't escape infographics these days, and while usually for better (but sometimes much worse) the visualization of research findings has elevated our expectations on how information and knowledge is communicated. This has obvious implications when researching, writing, and communicating a thesis, which usually require strict adherence to formatting and can often include complex research processes difficult to make out when raeding over a hundred pages of text...
The current series of posts deal with how to communicate research; but in this case research process, rather than the results that infographics generally show. These aren't a visual representation of data, but a depiction of the conceptual framework and processes used to generate research findings.
Above is the first attempt at understanding what the conceptual framework is of this research. This was the broadest interpretation of the research focus area, and assumed that design research must leverage collective intelligence in order to address development challenges in unprecedented ways. Not bad, but a little too vague.
The second attempt simplified the visual while adding more precision to the specific topics under study. A key difference is that while the first diagram had all three fields intersecting, it became apparent that ICT4D was the bridge between collective intelligence and participatory design. CI and PD aren't new fields conceptually, however, ICT is what enables them to finally collide and ultimately progress design research to a new level. This diagram motivated the central research question of
How can ICT and social technologies be used as effective design research tools in community-specific participatory design within a community?
As is common with most graduate research, the first step was the literature review. While this research was conducted mostly according to grounded theory methodology - which states that a pre-research literature review will bias the researcher to fit results into existing theories - an initial Stage 1 literature review was necessary to sufficiently inform me on the fields in order to conduct meaningful and informed interviews. Also, due to coursework taken on the research topics, it wasn't possible to completely ignore existing theory.
The first stages in literature review and analysis of companies and projects (depicted in centre) made it apparent that the fields lacked a certain cohesion and existing interdisciplinary connections. While literature and existing companies hinted at other fields of relevance, they didn't appear to be leveraging theory or knowledge from within them, aside from a general awareness and hunch.
At this point, I decided that what what was needed to progress these fields (and my personal research) within a design context was the development of
a set of guidelines for the application of ICT and social technologies within participatory design research.
The development and ultimate application of these unifying guidelines became the focus of ongoing research efforts.
The latter half of the figure shows what was done post-Stage 1 literature review and coursework. This involved interviewing participants identified as subject matter practising experts from the four projects and companies depicted within the diagram. It was important to engage with practitioners to supplement existing theory as another layer of knowledge and practical experience.
Research progressed through coding of interviews (which occurred concurrently after all interviews were condcted), and then a Stage 2 literature review where the results from the interviews identified sources for further more specific literature theory. Ultimately, the primary data gained from the interviews were the main source of content for the guidelines.
The next post will focus on the depiction of the guidelines themselves as well as their application in context.
This research project (after all, that's what this was all about...) was broken down into 2 phases. Soon I'll re-post the conceptual framework that breaks down how this all played out... Essentially, Phase 1 dealt with developing a set of guidelines for the application of ICT and social technologies as design research tools in community-specific participatory design. Phase 2 dealt with testing a component of these guidelines.
The diagram above represents the types of design research explored in the application of the Participatory Design-Information Communication Technology (PD-ICT) guidelines in Phase 2. The goal of these guidelines is to supplement the depth of conventional design research processes with a new promised breadth that technology will enable.
