# Participatory Design

Summary of method
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Participatory design is an approach to designing products, services, or systems that actively involves the end users and stakeholders throughout the design process. End-users are considered as experts in their own experiences and are invited to contribute their insights, ideas, and feedback at every stage of development. This collaborative approach aims to ensure that the resulting design meets the actual needs, preferences, and contexts of the users, leading to more usable, effective, and satisfying outcomes.

Examples of participatory approaches include co-design, co-creation, co-innovation. In all these cases, the 'co' signifies the working together of different stakeholders to achieve a specific end goal.

# **Practicing method**

Overview
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* *Time:* 90 minutes
* *Purpose*: to produce design ideas for an accessible smart kitchen
* *Materials or tools*: digital or analogue notepad, miro, storyboarding templates

Steps
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In this task you should design an accessible smart kitchen using a combination of participatory approaches combined with methods aimed at [designing for accessibility](/HyF3y9x3p). You should also integrate a [non-human dimension](https://hackmd.io/@UED24/BJEMwzA9p), which can be related to plants, animals, robots or artificial intelligence (for example).

1. Organise yourselves into groups of 4-6 people
2. Define a number of accessible and more-than human personas. You might want to use a **be near** approach to inform your personas, for example by looking at forums or other online spaces.
3. Pause for a while to share your personas with other groups
5. Now, within your group, assign each person a different stakeholder role, which should include at least one 'technology expert' and one 'kitchen user with a disability' and so on.
6. Using the personas, and in your roles, use brainstorming methods to come up with smart kitchen design features for people with accessibility needs and for more-than human needs (see below for examples). Reflect your ideas against all of the personas - you might decide to change or discard some in the process.

**Accessible example**: the smart kitchen has countertops that can be raised or lowered depending on who is using the kitchen. The smart kitchen recognises the context and adjusts without explicit instruction

**More-than human examples**: the smart kitchen can recognise when food that is toxic to dogs is being used and reminds to keep the food out of reach. The smart kitchen monitors the kitchen plants and herbs and reminds about their care.

###### tags: `method`