A Scandinavian approach to designing with children in a developing country - Exploring the applicability of participatory methods

Abstract

Participatory Design (PD) offers a democratic approach to design by creating a platform for active end-user participation in the design process. Since its emergence, the field of PD has been shaped by the Scandinavian context, in which many early PD projects took place. In this paper we discuss the challenges that arise from employing participatory methods in a different socio-cultural setting with participants who have had comparatively limited exposure to digital technologies. We offer a comparative study of two PD projects carried out with school classes in Scandinavia and India. While the setup for the two projects was identical, they unfolded in very different ways. We present and discuss this study, which leads us to conclude that PD can be a useful approach in both settings, but that there is a distinct difference as to which methods bring about fruitful results. The most prominent difference is the ways in which abstract and manifest participatory methods led to different outcomes in the two settings. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.