Sustaining participatory design initiatives

Abstract

While many participatory design (PD) projects succeed in establishing new organisational initiatives or creating technology that is attuned to the people affected, the issue of how such results are sustained after the project ends remains an important challenge. We explore the challenge of sustaining PD initiatives beyond the individual project and discuss implications for PD practice. First, based on current PD literature, we distinguish between four ideal typical forms of sustainability: maintaining, scaling, replicating and evolving. Second, we demonstrate from a case study how these various forms of sustainability may be pursued in PD practice and how they can become a resource in reflecting on PD activities. Finally, we discuss implications for PD practice, suggesting that a nuanced conception of sustainability and how it may relate to PD practice are useful resources for designers and researchers before, during and after design processes.

Keywords::

• participatory design
• sustainability
• maintaining
• scaling
• replicating
• evolving

Acknowledgements

This work has been inspired by the DIS 2012 workshop ‘Perspectives on Participation’ and we thank the attendees for their insights on sustainability in PD. We further thank our colleagues at the Center for Participatory IT and attendees at the 2013 summer PIT for constructive comments on the ideas in this paper. We wish to thank the pupils, teachers and administrators at Kjellerup School and Vinding School for their participation in the Litirum project.

Notes

^1. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Funding

This research has been carried out as part of the Play and Learning – Kids'n'Tweens Lifestyle project, funded by the European Development Fund [grant number ERDFD 08-0051], and Forum Southern Denmark.