How might we understand the evolution of participatory practices
over time and across various fields of practices?
The participatory design landscape began to take shape across the U.S. in the 1960s, punctuated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A participatory approach is one in which everyone who has a stake in the intervention has a voice and an influence in the decision-making process. There is growing interest from practitioners researchers in implementing this approach, however, not much research has described how participatory approaches in different fields relate to one another. There is an opportunity to share methods & resources across fields. The UC Davis Center for Design in the Public Interest put together a multidisciplinary team of researchers, practitioners, and students to fill this gap.
Challenges included (1) visualizing connections across disciplines and over time over time, and (2) making the knowledge we had accumulated accessible for a range of users.
Outcomes took the form of an interactive timeline website, downloadable posters, and downloadable data sets all available to other researchers, educators, and students under a Creative Commons license. We also published an academic paper on our interdisciplinary collaborative process.
Partners: UC Davis Center for Design in the Public Interest
Role: designer, documenter, and writer working with community development & computer science graduate students
Extent of the project: three months, part-time
Recognition: silver medal in research from the International Institute for Information Design (IIID), included in the IIIDAwards-Book and their world-wide traveling exhibition (2015–2016)
Tags: information design, user interface design, timeline design, interdisciplinary collaboration
Design Process.
The project unfolded in four main phases: research, prototyping & designing, and finally user-testing and revising to create the final prototype.
Research.
We conducted interviews both in-person and remotely to understand individual practices in the field. We also reviewed more than a hundred articles, books & websites to understand the landscape and forge connections between practices and disciplines.
We began by conducting interviews and a literature review, and mapping it out on butcher paper with post-it’s notes. The map grew as we connected key individuals, organizations, projects, writings, and social/cultural events across five decades and disciplines—community design, youth development, international development, public health, and technology development—to reveal key relationships and the changing historical context of the participatory approach.
Final timeline showing connections in participatory practices across various disciplines, along with various iterations of the design.
We shared the timeline with professionals and reserachers to get their feedback on its relevance to them:
"The review is great! The timeline is useful and valuable. I want to help! I know that lots of people would want to add to this!"
—Director, Association for Communication Design
Prototyping & Design.
Once we received affirmation from experts in the field that the timeline was useful to their practice, we worked on making it accessible and interactive. We turned the timeline into an educational tool, a website.
Our goal for the website was to make something that was dynamic, flexible, and simple for a non-coder to update. This meant that we had to create a web framework, or a customized content management system to ensure the timeline retained its design even after it was updated. I was tasked with designing the user interface of the website, and with creating communication artifacts about the process to share with the team.
Example of a communication artifact I created to share amongst the team who couldn't meet together often, and was coming from different disciplines. This diagram explains our customized content management system and they way Illustrator and Excel data files connect to create graphics on the website.
User Testing.
We tested the validity of the website, figured out the challenges of the design, and evaluated how end users were actually using the tool.
We tried various techniques for user testing including using printed screenshots of the website and having a group of users narrate their experience navigating it. We learned about the difficulty users were having with finding the categories on the timeline, and so we created a parallax scrolling mechanism in the navigation bar for easier access.
The final website with parallex scrolling, Index page with alphabetized list of connections, and Resources page where posters and data sets can be downloaded.
Next Steps: I travelled to Malmö University last summer to do research on contemporary Scandinavian participatory design practices. You can find my research report here.