Rachel Charlotte Smith

Participatory design at the museum: inquiring into children's everyday engagement in cultural heritage

We address the challenge of creating intersections between childrens everyday engagement and museum exhibitions. Specifically, we propose an approach to participatory design inquiry where childrens everyday engagement is taken as the point of departure. We base our discussion on a design workshop -- Gaming the Museum -- where a primary school class was invited to participate in exploring future exhibition spaces for a museum, based on their everyday use of computer games and online communities. We reflect on the results of the workshop, and broadly discuss the everyday engagement of children as point of departure for designing interactive museum exhibitions.

Child as Protagonist: Expanding the Role of Children in Participatory Design

We suggest that a commitment to political participatory design defines a new role for children in participatory practices--the role of protagonist. The objective here transcends the goal of giving children a voice in design, and addresses more broadly how children can be empowered to shape technological development and critically reflect on the role of technology in their practices. This re-accentuation of political participatory design to formulate the protagonist role is important, because it deepens our understanding of how children may be empowered through design. It is also timely in view of current societal challenges pertaining to training children in twenty-first century skills. Based on a case study, we illustrate how the protagonist role, based on political participatory design, can change the objective, process, and outcome measures of the design process.

Participatory heritage innovation: designing dialogic sites of engagement

Abstract Innovations in digital cultural communication for museums challenge us to develop appropriate methods for participation in curatorial processes and to rethink the role of audiences inside exhibitions. The article explores the potentials of scaffolding sites of dialogue and creative engagement through the design process and final exhibition. It draws upon experiences from an interactive exhibition project, Digital Natives, in which we combined principles from Participatory Design with issues of contemporary digital culture to explore possibilities for creating heritage innovation. We suggest three critical stages of the dialogic design process in which engagement between stakeholders, researchers, and audiences can be central to shaping and transforming future conceptions of digital cultural heritage, through process and final exhibition. In this way, we argue that a participatory design anthropological approach to digital culture can expand opportunities for heritage innovation through technological means of engagement in museums.

Participatory design in an era of participation

This special issue on participatory design in an era of participation presents emerging topics and discussions from the thirteenth Participatory Design Conference (PDC), held at Aarhus University in August 2016. The PDC 2016 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Participatory Design conference series, which began in 1990 with the first biannual conference in Seattle. Since then, the PDC conferences have continued to bring together a multidisciplinary, international community of researchers and practitioners around issues of cooperative design. The theme for the 2016 PDC conference was ‘Participatory Design in an Era of Participation’. Critical and constructive discussions were invited on the values, characteristics, politics and future practices of participatory design in an era in which participation has now become pervasive (Bossen, Smith, Kanstrup, McDonnell, et al. ‘PDC 16, Volume 1,’ 2016; Bossen, Smith, Kanstrup, Huybrechts, et al. ‘PDC 16, Volume 2,’ 2016). All five contributions in this special issue address both core and emerging topics in participatory design research. All take their starting-point in a fundamental research interest in the design and research of information and communication technology (ICT), and more broadly in technologies in general in which various kinds of stakeholder are involved. Exploring participation in the research and design of ICT has been central to participatory design since this research community first began to emerge in the early 1990s (Greenbaum and Kyng 1991; Schuler and Namioka 1993). Central to the pursuit of how to involve end-users in the development of ICT were core ideals of democracy that were rooted in the North American and Scandinavian political landscapes of the time as these underwent fundamental change. In the early Scandinavian research projects, this was evidenced in a series of projects that involved workers and fought for workers’ rights to participate in the development of technology at their workplaces (Bjerknes et al. 1987; Ehn 1988). This political attention has remained a characteristic of PDC ever since, though in various forms and sometimes at much weaker intensity, and complemented by pragmatic and ethical arguments for involving users in design. Participatory design is rooted in a concern for located accountabilities in technology design (Suchman 2002) and in values stating that those who will be affected by new technology have a legitimate reason to be involved in its design (Kensing and Blomberg 1998). In early participatory design research, involving users in technology design was new, provoking, and challenging because establishing a space in which researchers, software enterprises, managers and end-users could meet, exchange ideas and learn from one another required the development of new techniques and methods for scaffolding participatory processes and interactions. This focus on approaches to establish mutual learning among the various stakeholders has been a core strand of research in participatory design ever since the first conference. Participatory approaches and concepts continue to be developed and critically researched across a very broad range of application domains, even as new disciplines addressing user involvement change the landscape in which participation in design unfolds (Halskov and Hansen 2015; Sanders and Stappers 2008). For a recent overview of participatory design, see Simonsen and Robertson (2013). In the last decade, ‘participation’ has become popular across industry and public administration as a way to better connect to customers and publics. The growth of the internet and

Design anthropology in participatory design from ethnography to anthropological critique

In this workshop we explore the opportunities of ethnography and design anthropology in Participatory Design (PD) as an approach to design in an increasingly global and digital world. Traditionally, ethnography has been used in PD to research real-life contexts and challenges, and as ways to involve people in defining user-needs and design opportunities. As the boundaries between physical, digital and hybrid spaces and experiences become increasingly blurred, so do conventional distinctions between research and design. This half-day workshop invites participants to discuss and explore opportunities of using design anthropology as a holistic and critical approach to societal challenges, and a way for anthropologists and designers to engage in design that extends beyond the empirical.

When the museum goes native

On Heritage aims to offer and promote a rich discussion at the intersection of art, performance, and culture that expands the boundaries of HCI while broadening our understanding of how things of the past come to matter in the present. Elisa Giaccardi, Editor

Valuable Connections: Design Anthropology and Co‐creation in Digital Innovation

This paper explores challenges and potentials for innovation and co-creation within an increasingly interconnected and digitalized world, and its affect on ethnographic practices within the field of design and business development. Our discussion is based on material from an interdisciplinary research and design project with a leading computer game developer, exploring opportunities of involving online gaming communities in innovation processes and product development. Based on our case, we argue that in a world with increasingly blurred boundaries between physical, digital and hybrid contexts, as well as design, production and use, we might need to rethink the role of ethnography within user centred design and business development. Here the challenge is less about “getting closer” to user needs and real-life contexts, through familiarization, mediation, and facilitation, and more about creating a critical theoretically informed distance from which to perceive and reflect upon complex interconnections between people, technology, business and design, as well as our roles as researchers and designers within these.