Participatory Design

Participatory design is a collaborative approach to design that actively involves users and stakeholders in the design process. It aims to create products and services that better meet the needs and expectations of users by levering and applying their knowledge and experiences. It’s a democratic process because it empathizes that users should take part in designing the products and services they will be using.

The method or philosophy is also known as co-operative design, co-design, community design, or community-based participatory research. Various fields use participatory design, including architecture, urban planning, UX and product design. 

The Principles of Participatory Design

Participatory design is based on the principles of collaboration, co-creation, and empowerment. Users contribute to the design process, which allows them to provide feedback, suggest ideas, and participate in decision-making. The goal is to create products and services that accommodate users’ needs and help them achieve their objectives. 

Participatory Design and UX Design

Participatory design is a key component of UX design because it actively seeks feedback and input from users throughout the design process. By involving users in the design process, UX designers can gain insights into user needs, preferences, and behaviors, which can inform design decisions and help to create products, services, or systems that are more user-friendly and effective. In UX design, participatory design can be used to gather user feedback, test ideas, and validate designs. It can also be used to create user personas, user scenarios, user journey maps and other assets.

Victor Udoewa, Service Design Lead at NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Research (SBIR/STTR) Program, talks about the origins of participatory design in his Master Class, Radical Participatory Design: Insights from NASA’s Service Design Lead.

If you’d like to find out what Victor defines as radical participatory design, we recommend you watch his full Master Class.

The Benefits of Participatory Design

Participatory design has several benefits for both designers and users. 

• Improved user satisfaction: Participatory design can lead to products, services, or systems that are better suited to the needs of users. When designers involve users in the design process, they get a deeper understanding of user needs and preferences that they may have otherwise overlooked, which can lead to a better user experience.

• Increased user engagement: When users participate in the design process, they are more likely to feel invested in the final product, service, or system. This can lead to increased user engagement and a greater sense of ownership over the product.

• Reduced development costs: Participatory design can help to identify design flaws early on in the process, which can save time and money in the long run. Users involved in the design process will help designers catch potential issues before they become costly problems.

• Improved innovation: Participatory design helps designers gain insights into new and innovative ways of solving problems. Users often have unique perspectives and ideas that can lead to breakthroughs in design.

• Increased social inclusion: Participatory design can help to ensure that products, services, or systems are accessible and inclusive to all users, including those who might otherwise be marginalized or excluded.

Participatory Design in the Real World 

In the early 2000s, the city of Bogotá, Colombia, embarked on a participatory design project to improve its public transportation system. The city's leaders recognized that the existing system was inadequate, inefficient, and often dangerous, and they wanted to involve the city's residents to design a better system.

The project, called "TransMilenio," involved a series of community meetings, workshops, and design charrettes (intensive, hands-on workshops that bring community members and people from different disciplines and backgrounds together) where residents could provide input and feedback on the design of the new system. The city's leaders also worked with transportation experts and urban planners to create a system that was both effective and user-friendly.

As a result of the participatory design process, the TransMilenio system was designed with features that were important to the city's residents, such as dedicated bus lanes, stations with high platforms for easy boarding, and pre-paid tickets to speed up boarding times. The system has been credited with reducing travel times, improving safety, and increasing access to jobs and services for residents.

The success of the TransMilenio project has inspired other cities around the world to adopt participatory design methods to improve their own transportation systems, demonstrating the power of involving users in the design process to create more effective and user-friendly solutions.

Participatory design is a collaborative approach to design that involves end-users in the design process. It has several benefits for both designers and users, and it is closely related to UX design. When users are involved in the design process, designers can create products, services, or systems that are more user-centered, effective, and socially inclusive.

Learn More about Participatory Design

Watch Victor Udoewa’s Master Class on Radical Participatory Design.

The course Design for a Better World with Don Norman teaches you how you can use participatory design to help solve some of the world’s most complex problems such as climate change.

The course Agile Methods for UX Design covers participatory design in the context of the agile methodology.

Norman, Donald A. Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered. Cambridge, MA, MA: The MIT Press, 2023.

Read more articles and essays by Don Norman on JND.org.

Explore participatory design with Sanders & Stappers paper, Probes, toolkits and prototypes: three approaches to making in codesigning.

Software company Imaginary Cloud have written a blog on participatory design.

Check out MIT D-Lab’s blog on the benefits of participatory design.

Read Science Direct’s definition of participatory design.