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Outcomes we didn't expect: participant's shifting investment in graphic design

Published: 29 November 2010 Publication History

Abstract

A criticism of graphic design is that designers work intuitively, without knowing their audience. We report on a study in which childcare workers and designers jointly developed strategies to encourage low-chemical cleaning in childcare. The workers' inclusion in design sought to address the barriers and triggers to effective communication of cleaning principles to childcare workers across the sector. Participatory design (PD) is rarely used in graphic design. Indeed, we speculate that PD poses a specific challenge in graphic design since participation exposes prospective audience members to the messages to be communicated. In our study, designing immersed the childcare workers in the information for dissemination, prompting them to see designs targeting them as irrelevant and to nominate an audience of relief workers, children and parents as the target for design. Employing case study method, we explore the complex contextual and human factors that lead the childcare workers to no longer represent themselves in the PD process.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Zineography: A Community-Based Research-through-Design Method of Zine Making for Unequal ContextsProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685390(1-17)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2021)How graphic designers rely on intuition as an ephemeral facility to support their creative design processInternational Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation10.1080/21650349.2021.19513589:4(252-268)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2021

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  1. Outcomes we didn't expect: participant's shifting investment in graphic design

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    PDC '10: Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference
    November 2010
    314 pages
    ISBN:9781450301312
    DOI:10.1145/1900441
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    • DE: Digital Eskimo
    • UTS-HCTDRS: The UTS Human Centred Technology Design Research Strength
    • University of Technology Sydney
    • Roskilde University
    • SIGCHI-Australia: ACM SIGCHI Australia
    • Zumio: Zumio

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 29 November 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. graphic design
    2. localised communication
    3. mass communication
    4. participatory design

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    PDC '10
    Sponsor:
    • DE
    • UTS-HCTDRS
    • SIGCHI-Australia
    • Zumio
    PDC '10: The 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference
    November 29 - December 3, 2010
    Sydney, Australia

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 49 of 289 submissions, 17%

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    View all
    • (2024)Zineography: A Community-Based Research-through-Design Method of Zine Making for Unequal ContextsProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685390(1-17)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
    • (2021)How graphic designers rely on intuition as an ephemeral facility to support their creative design processInternational Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation10.1080/21650349.2021.19513589:4(252-268)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2021

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