Participants' interpretations of PD workshop results
Abstract
While the majority of participatory design (PD) research deals with the development of tools and the analysis of occurrences during workshops, we believe more research into the meaning and value of PD study results is needed to make PD more attractive to design practice. In this paper we present how forty participants of an ongoing one-year healthcare project interpret the outcomes of participatory design sessions with varying topics differently and what can be learned from that. We find that different workshop topics and different roles in the project lead to significant differences in how workshop outcomes are interpreted by individual participants, project managers, and researchers. These results illustrate the value of an inventory of the interpretations of individual participants of workshops results so that we are able to dynamically adjust successive sessions to match these perspectives and hence improve the success of the whole PD study.
