Toward Participatory Design: The Head and the Heart Revisited

Participatory design is a movement among system developers to encourage active participation in the design process by people using computer systems. Participatory design is not one set of methods or beliefs, but rather an approach that tries to borrow practices from other areas and apply them to the workplace in order to enable people to speak out about their needs. This article discusses some of the basic ideas and their relationship to the women’s movement. 1 Focus on People in the Workplace Participatory design is many things to many people. Arising out of the movement for user-centered design in the 1980’s, participatory design is not one set of ideas or methods. Rather it is an attempt to build a bridge which links people who are using computers in their workplace with computer systems developers, who until recently stood as experts on the other side. Perhaps it’s most common element is the fact that it’s built on the premis