UPCOMING: The Participatory Design Conference: UX/SD Highlights

The Participatory Design (PD) Conference in Sydney now has its preliminary programme up. While this is an academic research conference the nature of participatory design (designing with people) means the conference deals with very designerly and practice-based issues.

As a design conference, it’ll be of most value to people interested in incorporating participatory co-design and user innovation methods into their practice, projects and organisations, or building on existing user centred design approaches#.

The conference includes tutorials, workshops, panels, research presentations and industry cases and topics are as diverse as civic engagement, rural development, large scale IT systems, health, education and museums. Below are some highlights from the programme that might be of interest to the UX & Service Design community in particular. Continue reading…

Dissolving Boundaries – OZCHI 2009 Paper

The discipline of design is in a constant state of change. As noted in the previous post one of the most significant trends currently impacting on design practice is the opening up of the design process. Design is moving out from the studio and into the wild, taking place where people live [1].  Users are being re-cast as co-designers, co-creators and co-developers. Trends such as ‘open design’, ‘crowdsourcing’, designing for design in use, post-release iterations and ‘emergent design’ provide new ways for people to participate in the design process,  and challenge some of our traditional models of design.

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Mapping methods, techniques, tools and design values

Methods can be a bit like a black box. Embedded within them are particular assumptions about design and participation that can be unwittingly projected into our design process and outcomes. If we hope to privilege sociability, flexibility and openness in our designs, these values can be better supported through some tools and techniques more than others. In my thesis I have drawn attention to particular qualities and concepts relevant to design in the context of social technologies. I’m in the process of making these available to others in different ways such as maps, vocabularies and considerations.

mapping goals, experiences, enablers and qualities in early design research

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