Participatory design (originally co-operative design, now often co-design) is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders (e.g. employees, partners, customers, citizens, end users) in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable. Participatory design is an approach which is focused on processes and procedures of design and is not a design style. The term is used in a variety of fields e.g. software design, urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, sustainability, graphic design, planning, and health services development as a way of creating environments that are more responsive and appropriate to their inhabitants' and users' cultural, emotional, spiritual and practical needs. It is also one approach to placemaking.
Recent research suggests that designers create more innovative concepts and ideas when working within a co-design environment with others than they do when creating ideas on their own.
Participatory design has been used in many settings and at various scales. For some, this approach has a political dimension of user empowerment and democratization. For others, it is seen as a way of abrogating design responsibility and innovation by designers.
In several Scandinavian countries, during the 1960s and 1970s, participatory design was rooted in work with trade unions; its ancestry also includes action research and sociotechnical design.
Definition
In participatory design, participants (putative, potential or future) are invited to cooperate with designers, researchers and developers during an innovation process. Co-design requires the end user's participation: not only in decision making but also in idea generation. Potentially, they participate during several stages of an innovation process: they participate during the initial exploration and problem definition both to help define the problem and to focus ideas for solution, and during development, they help evaluate proposed solutions. Maarten Pieters and Stefanie Jansen describe co-design as part of a complete co-creation process, which refers to the "transparent process of value creation in ongoing, productive collaboration with, and supported by all relevant parties, with end-users playing a central role" and covers all stages of a development process.
Differing terms
In "Co-designing for Society", Deborah Szebeko and Lauren Tan list various precursors of co-design, starting with the Scandinavian participatory design movement and then state "Co-design differs from some of these areas as it includes all stakeholders of an issue not just the users, throughout the entire process from research to implementation."
In contrast, Elizabeth Sanders and Peter Stappers state that "the terminology used until the recent obsession with what is now called co-creation/co-design" was "participatory design".
Similarly, a topic of interest is that of Golsby-Smith's "Fourth-Order Design" which outlines a design process in which end-user participation is required and favours individual process over outcome.
Fourth-order design
This design process brings in cultural contexts to the design process. Culture as defined by Buchanan "is not a state, expressed in an ideology or a body of doctrines. It is an activity. Culture is the activity of ordering, disordering and reordering in the search for understanding and for values which guide action." Therefore, to design for the fourth-order one must design within the widest scope. The system is discussion and the focus falls onto process rather than outcome.
Different dimensions
As described by Sanders and Stappers, one could position co-design as a form of human-centered design across two different dimensions. One dimension is the emphasis on research or design, another dimension is how much people are involved. Therefore, there are many forms of co-design, with different degrees of emphasis on research or design and different degrees of stakeholder involvement. For instance, one of the forms of co-design which involves stakeholders strongly early at the front end design process in the creative activities is generative co-design. Generative co-design is increasingly being used to involve different stakeholders as patient, care professionals and designers actively in the creative making process to develop health services.