Workspace lab: Planning participatory design

Abstract

Can a participatory process help planning workspace participatory design? In this paper, we address this opportunity by presenting a toolkit developed with this purpose. This toolkit suggests creating a temporary and hypothetical environment called Workspace Lab, aiming at bringing up design dialogues into focus and giving insights on how to stage them, while bridging the gap of merging user involvement with the well-defined design work-practice. The Workspace Lab toolkit was gradually built during a research project, including three participatory workshops emphasizing joint exploration of both format and content by designers, who are the main intended users of this “laboratory” together with ergonomists, human factors specialists and other design stakeholders. The result was a flexible material that helps designers building a participatory process specifically for each project. The Workspace Lab toolkit contains not only suggestions of participatory methods that can be used during workspace design, but also brings in possibilities for planning the whole participatory process while discussing the different possibilities.