Program theory for participatory design

Abstract

How does participatory design work and what are the links between investments in terms of time, people and skills, the processes and the resulting effects? This paper explores program theory as a way for Participatory Design (PD) to investigate and evaluate these issues. Program theory comes out of the evaluation field and is a way to make explicit the assumptions of how programs and projects are supposed to produce results by detailing the elements and causal links between them.

Full text at ACM