Participatory Design Conference 23/03/2011

Following on from last November’s workshop we’ve drawn together the key issues that emerged during the event. 

You can also download this as a PDF: Key issues from the PDC workshop ; and we’ve put together a poster capturing the post-it wall from the workshop: PDC Poster 2010 

Key issues from PDC 2010 workshop

1.      Triangle of tensions: 

 

The workshop participants described a ‘triangle of tension’ between the drivers for the research and the reality of undertaking the research.  Each viewpoint has its own agenda and influences not only the practice and outputs of the research, but how the research team interact with the organisations or cultures in which the research is to take place.  Specifically within healthcare many implicit and explicit cultural norms can influence the research.  A common theme was that often the success of a project was linked to it being ‘embedded’ in the organisation.

 2.      Recruitment 

Determining whom to involve in recruitment is a complex issue, particularly in healthcare.  It was agreed that usually in participatory methods the recruitment should involve all stakeholders, not simply those immediately affected by the product or service to be investigated.  The involvement of staff in healthcare was seen as both an opportunity and a threat to working with patients, and needs to be carefully managed.  The timing of recruitment is further complicated in healthcare by the inflexible and unresponsive Governance and ethics procedures, these have to be carefully considered and mapped out at the beginning of the project.  It is often the most vulnerable patients whose views should be sought, but whose views are hardest to elicit.  Particular attention should be paid to how to support these individuals to recognise their contribution.  It is possible to achieve this through advocates or carers, again this must be considered in the planning stage.  Recruitment may be complicated by the very nature of the reason for recruitment, if stigma surrounds the condition or stage of life to be investigated very careful planning and advertising is required to ameliorate and perceived stigma to gain participation. 

3.     Sustaining Engagement 

 Even once you have recruited all those individuals you need, health poses its own unique challenges to sustaining involvement.  It was recognised that the research process can appear sporadic and disjointed for participants; particular attention must be paid to participants whilst the research team is busy writing or analysing to maintain engagement.  This recognised some potential tension between the needs of the researchers and those of the participants, as contributors to the research and as research participants, users of health and social care and members of society.  Potential strategies to address these issues were around stepped incremental engagement and careful pacing of research and feedback meetings.  Once again planning the engagement activity carefully to reflect the associated demands of the research process, reflection and writing. 

A challenge is the need to recognise and value engagement, do participants have Intellectual property rights over co-designed solutions, and how we sell the positives of engagement. 

4.     Evaluation 

Evaluation is challenging due to the diverse outputs and actions of participatory research.  A service may be redesigned, but through involvement in the research participants may gain experience and skills and confidence that without the project they wouldn’t have. 

We need to recognise the challenges of evaluating design research in real life situations, where it is difficult to trace the impact of a project in a large rapidly evolving organisation.  We have to be better at looking at the direct and indirect impacts of research process and research outcomes, how to evaluate indirect impacts, trace back the precursors of an impact and attribute it to the design process. 

Health incorporates a lot of different audiences so evaluation needs to produce ‘evidence’ that is both audience and context specific. 

5.     How to scale to the individual? 

Traditional research tends to move from researching and designing for a small sample of a population with a view to generalise findings and rolling out designs to the larger population.   In contrast, a strategy that responds more to the individual diversity within populations might be termed scaling to the individual. In this approach to service design for example, services are designed to provide the means by which individuals, or different groups, to adapt, personalise, customise or tailor the key parameters of the service to their local requirements or individual needs.  

Previously on PDC…. 

Hello everyone, 

We’re really looking forward to meeting you all in Sydney in two weeks. 

Here’s just a quick reminder of what we will be doing in the workshop. Our aim is to reflect on the global care challenge and draw from everyone’s experiences in participatory design. We will all be sharing our experiences of participatory design in health and social care, use them to identify common themes, opportunities and challenges, and discuss the implications for future design and research. To this end, we originally asked you to submit descriptions of your PD experiences in health and social care in the form of ‘inspiration stories’. Thank you to those of you who have already done so. 

For everyone else, you might like to consider a significant or recent project and reflect upon which were the best and worst aspects of conducting it (as designers and as researchers) at all stages, from obtaining the relevant funding to disseminating the findings. Within this, what were the challenges you faced and how did you overcome them (or not)? 

There will be time during the workshop to tell us these stories, but we would like to share them here in advance to ensure we make as best use of them as possible: 

• Janet Kelly’s (SPIRE, University of Southern Denmark) inspiration story;
• Sara Eriksén’s (Blekinge Institute of Technology) inspiration story;
• Michelle Pickrell’s (University of Technology, Sydney) inspiration story;
• Position paper from Geraldine Fitzpatrick (HCT Group Vienna,University of Technology);
• Position paper from Hanne Lindegaard, Tanja Rosenqvist & Ulrik Jorgensen (DTU Denmark);
• Example stories of UCHD’s PD activities;
• Example stories of IT University of Copenhagen’s PD activities;
• And, a reminder of the PDC 2010 workshop outline.

(We’ve password-protected this page for the time being, but if everyone is happy for their stories to be made public we can make it open access later.) 

If you have the opportunity to write a brief account of your experiences of PD in health and social care, we will add it to this page. But if not, please come prepared to tell us your stories at the workshop. 

We’ve planned a mixture of group activities and discussion time during the workshop, so we should have a lively and productive day. 

The day should begin at 09.30, we’ll aim to finish around 17.00 and there’s the option to go out for dinner together later to continue our discussions in more relaxed surroundings (or just enjoy each others’ company). 

Please get in touch if you have any other questions (hello@uchd.org.uk). 

See you all in Oz! 

Simon Bowen
Eva Brandt
Lone Malmborg
Daniel Wolstenholme
Peter Wright
(Workshop Organisers)