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Impediments to user gains: experiences from a critical participatory design project

Published: 12 August 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Actual studies of user gains from involvement in design processes are few, although a concern for user gains is a core characteristic of participatory design (PD). We explore the question of user gains through a retrospective evaluation of a critical PD project. We conducted ten qualitative interviews with participants in a project aimed at developing technology to foster engaging museum experiences and rethinking cultural heritage communication. Despite the use of established PD techniques by experienced PD practitioners, a significant number of frustrations relating to the PD process were prominent in the study. Based on these findings, we provide an analysis of impediments to user gains in PD projects in terms of unresolved differences between aims, absence of a clear set-up for collaboration, and different conceptions of technology.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
PDC '12: Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers - Volume 1
August 2012
147 pages
ISBN:9781450308465
DOI:10.1145/2347635
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]

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  • CPSR: Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
  • Roskilde University

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 August 2012

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Author Tags

  1. evaluation
  2. impediments
  3. participatory design
  4. user gains

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  • Research-article

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PDC '12
Sponsor:
  • CPSR
PDC '12: 12th Participatory Design Conference
August 12 - 16, 2012
Roskilde, Denmark

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Overall Acceptance Rate 49 of 289 submissions, 17%

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  • (2023)Developing A Mobile App With a Human-Centered Design Lens to Improve Access to Mental Health Care (Mentallys Project): Protocol for an Initial Co-Design ProcessJMIR Research Protocols10.2196/4722012(e47220)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Towards Labor Transparency in Situated Computational Systems Impact ResearchProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3593013.3594060(1026-1037)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2023
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