[Paper Review] Participatory design: A systematic review and insights for future practice

Peter Wacnik, Shanna Daly+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Sep 26, 2024

Innovative Approaches in Technology and Social Development4 citations

TL;DR

This systematic review synthesizes 88 peer-reviewed studies on Participatory Design (PD) to clarify its current practices, identify recurring methods, and offer actionable insights for future application. It reveals that PD is predominantly applied in intangible system design, with stakeholders actively involved across multiple stages using diverse techniques, offering a foundation for more equitable and effective design processes.

ABSTRACT

Participatory Design -- an iterative, flexible design process that uses the close involvement of stakeholders, most often end users -- is growing in use across design disciplines. As an increasing number of practitioners turn to Participatory Design (PD), it has become less rigidly defined, with stakeholders engaged to varying degrees through the use of disjointed techniques. This ambiguous understanding can be counterproductive when discussing PD processes. Our findings synthesize key decisions and approaches from design peers that can support others in engaging in PD practice. We investigated how scholars report the use of Participatory Design in the field through a systematic literature review. We found that a majority of PD literature examined specific case studies of PD (53 of 88 articles), with the design of intangible systems representing the most common design context (61 of 88 articles). Stakeholders most often participated throughout multiple stages of a design process (65 of 88 articles), recruited in a variety of ways and engaged in several of the 14 specific participatory techniques identified. This systematic review provides today's practitioners synthesized learnings from past Participatory Design processes to inform and improve future use of PD, attempting to remedy inequitable design by engaging directly with stakeholders and users.

Motivation & Objective

• To clarify the evolving and often ambiguous definition of Participatory Design (PD) in contemporary research and practice.
• To identify common patterns, techniques, and stakeholder involvement levels across PD studies to improve methodological consistency.
• To address inequities in design by synthesizing evidence on how direct stakeholder engagement enhances design outcomes.
• To provide practitioners with actionable insights derived from a comprehensive analysis of PD literature.
• To guide future PD practice by highlighting effective strategies and recurring challenges in stakeholder participation.

Proposed method

• Conducted a systematic literature review of 88 peer-reviewed articles on Participatory Design (PD) from the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), computer science, and social sciences.
• Categorized studies based on design context, stakeholder involvement stages, recruitment methods, and specific participatory techniques used.
• Identified and analyzed 14 distinct participatory techniques reported across the literature to map their frequency and application context.
• Synthesized findings across studies to extract recurring design decisions and implementation patterns.
• Focused on qualitative synthesis of case studies and methodological reporting to identify best practices and gaps.
• Used thematic and frequency-based analysis to highlight dominant trends in PD application, particularly in intangible system design.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How is Participatory Design currently being applied across different design contexts in academic literature?
• RQ2 What are the most frequently used participatory techniques in PD processes, and how are they deployed across the design lifecycle?
• RQ3 To what extent are stakeholders involved across multiple stages of the design process, and how are they recruited?
• RQ4 What patterns emerge in the reporting of PD methods, and how do they reflect evolving or inconsistent practices?
• RQ5 What insights can be derived from past PD applications to inform more equitable and effective future design practices?

Key findings

• A majority of PD literature (53 out of 88 articles) focuses on specific case studies, indicating a strong emphasis on practical, context-specific applications.
• Intangible systems (e.g., software, services, processes) represent the most common design context, appearing in 61 of the 88 reviewed articles.
• Stakeholders are most often involved across multiple stages of the design process in 65 of the 88 articles, suggesting a trend toward sustained engagement.
• Fifteen distinct participatory techniques were identified, with varying degrees of use, indicating a lack of standardized methodological frameworks.
• Recruitment of stakeholders occurs through a wide variety of methods, reflecting inconsistent and often under-specified approaches in the literature.
• Despite growing adoption, PD remains inconsistently defined and applied, with limited methodological rigor in reporting stakeholder roles and techniques.