Participatory design and “democratizing innovation”

We sketch an alternative “ddemocratizing innovation”” practice more in line with the original visions of participatory design based on our experience of running Malmö Living Labs - an open innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and ideas evolve from bottom-up long--term collaborations amongst diverse stakeholders.

Institutional Learning and Change: An initiative to promote greater impact through agricultural research for poverty alleviation

The ILAC Initiative consists of an evolving community of individuals committed to increasing the contributions of agricultural research to sustainable poverty reduction around the world. ILAC promotes research, methodology development and capacity development to increase understanding of agricultural change processes and increase the effectiveness of interventions to stimulate pro-poor innovation. This paper presents a broad overview of ILAC, including its background, origins and evolution, objectives and activities. It also presents the initiative’s central hypothesis and a set of guiding questions. Theoretical frameworks that show promise for increasing understanding of issues related to capacities to learn, facilitate innovation, and contribute to poverty reduction are introduced.agricultural, research, ILAC, pro-poor, innovation, farmers, Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Security and Poverty, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Maker Movements, Do-It-Yourself Cultures and Participatory Design: Implications for HCI Research

Falling costs and the wider availability of computational components, platforms and ecosystems have enabled the expansion of maker movements and DIY cultures. This can be considered as a form of democratization of technology systems design, in alignment with the aims of Participatory Design approaches. However, this landscape is constantly evolving, and long-term implications for the HCI community are far from clear. The organizers of this one-day workshop invite participants to present their case studies, experiences and perspectives on the topic with the goal of increasing understanding within this area of research. The outcomes of the workshop will include the articulation of future research directions with the purpose of informing a research agenda, as well as the establishment of new collaborations and networks

Cultivating sportswear innovation: A mixed approach combining the lead user method and participatory design

This thesis aims to study how could the mixed approach combining the lead user method and participatory design cultivate sportswear innovation in local sports culture. The research consists of an exploratory literature review and an empirical case study. Since sportswear has exceeded its primary function purpose toward fashion, culture, and wearable technology, customers’ needs have become more diverse and heterogeneous. Even though designers in major sportswear firms have involved users during the product development process, most of the involved users are sports hobbyists who work in the firms. Besides, both centralization of the organizational design process and lack of cross-department collaboration in sportswear firms are the additional barriers to translate the actual customers’ needs into the desired products. To explore a new perspective to solve the described problems, the thesis will review user-driven innovation and participatory design, which both have a reputation in “democratizing innovation” (Bjögvinsson et al., 2010). The lead user method in user-driven innovation theory and the conceptualization of design “Things” (Ehn, 2008) in participatory design studies are underlined. The literature review concludes by demonstrating the complementary characteristics of the lead user method and participatory design. Based on that, a framework that combines the two areas for sportswear innovation is proposed. The empirical case study examines the mixed approach in practice based on one experimental project, “The future of flying Finns,” which consists of two collaborative workshops. In both of the collaborative workshops, identified lead users and industry experts together co-identify innovation opportunities and generate solution ideas from the exploration of the Finnish trail running culture. The research collects the data from two focus group interviews, observation, and self-reflection. Two within-case analyses conducted to examine the collected data provide the insights into the research, which leads to the final cross-case analysis that focuses on investigating the similarities and differences between the two. The research results are the basis for three guidelines for practicing the mixed approach: planning a collaborative workshop in an innovation project, designing a co-creative toolkit, and mapping innovation context with collective knowledge. First, findings of planning a collaborative workshop are enhancing the effectiveness of participatory design, recognizing the requirement of abstract thinking for lead users, and catalyzing the process with well-prepared workshop materials. Second, findings of designing a co-creative toolkit for collaborative innovation sessions include a clear toolkit structure for communication and vision, inspiring visual aids, and playfulness with a shared interface. Finally, the findings demonstrate the roles and contributions of lead users, industry experts, and facilitator in the innovation context mapping process. In conclusion, this research implies that the mixed approach is capable of co-identifying innovation opportunities and creating new values and meanings to local runners by switching the focus from performance-driven innovation to social innovation. Moreover, it is flexible in team formation through selecting lead users and industry experts with different knowledge backgrounds to explore new innovation opportunities

Self-designing protests: Exploring participatory design activism through the Colombian graphic (design) explosion

This paper explores the notion of participatory design activism to describe design interventions that fall in between participatory design and design activism, arising organically through self-organisation. Illustrated by three examples from the Colombian graphic (design) explosion, which occurred during the mass protests in 2021, a case is made to decentre the designer from the process, arguing that protests are instead (co)designed by a variety of actors. The nature of the interventions described show that participatory design can make a difference through its marriage to design activism. In this context, designers take a step back and allow others to use, appropriate and expand on their creative concepts, effectively self-designing the protest as well as its surrounding environment

Self-production: a human centered design process. The sustainable future of self-production through a humanistic and participatory process

Self-production is a human-centred design process, which shows how design is moving towards the management of the entire process (design, production, distribution, communication) rather than focusing exclusively on the final product. Humanities can support self-production not only upstream, as a source of inspiration for mindful projects, but also throughout the process to manage the user involvement in practices of participatory design, as well as downstream, for designing the distribution and the communication of a product in an anthropocentric way

Institutional Learning and Change: an initiative to promote greater impact through agricultural research for poverty alleviation

The ILAC Initiative consists of an evolving community of individuals committed to increasing the contributions of agricultural research to sustainable poverty reduction around the world. ILAC promotes research, methodology development and capacity development to increase understanding of agricultural change processes and increase the effectiveness of interventions to stimulate pro-poor innovation. This paper presents a broad overview of ILAC, including its background, origins and evolution, objectives and activities. It also presents the initiative’s central hypothesis and a set of guiding questions. Theoretical frameworks that show promise for increasing understanding of issues related to capacities to learn, facilitate innovation, and contribute to poverty reduction are introduced

Scaling Participation -- What Does the Concept of Managed Communities Offer for Participatory Design?

This paper investigates mechanisms for scaling participation in participatory design (PD). Specifically, the paper focuses on managed communities, one strategy of generification work. We first give a brief introduction on the issue of scaling in PD, followed by exploring the strategy of managed communities in PD. This exploration is underlined by an ongoing case study in the healthcare sector, and we propose solutions to observed challenges. The paper ends with a critical reflection on the possibilities managed communities offer for PD. Managed communities have much to offer beyond mere generification work for large-scale information systems, but we need to pay attention to core PD values that are in danger of being sidelined in the process