Building understanding between users and designers through participatory design: The bonded design approach

Abstract

Universities face great pressure to adopt and integrate new technologies to enhance learning. Yet, often a gap exists between IT personnel who provide support based on their knowledge of how the technologies are designed to work and the faculty users who have differing ideas about how they need them to work. To address this gap, a large research-intensive university in New York State has embarked on an initiative using the Bonded Design participatory design methodology. Working together in design teams, IT staff and faculty will learn from each other to enable creation of technology solutions that could not be done by each group alone.