Community-Based Technology Co-Design: Insights on Participation, and the Value of the “Co”

Evidence and analysis of Community-Based Participatory Design (PD) and Co-Design programs are not abundant. Filling this gap allows for better understanding of (1) the value programs offer from a quantitative standpoint, and (2) how to formalize participation within PD. In this paper, we present evidence from a series of International Development Design Summits (IDDS), a PD-oriented program focused on low-cost technology co-design and co-production, in collaboration with local communities. The purpose is to provide opportunities for learning and practicing community-based PD in an intercultural setting. We examine data from five summits in Colombia between 2015-2018.We discuss the value of this approach across multiple groups, and how it can be understood as a measure of participation. We present evidence of participant benefits, including an exploratory analysis of self-perception using sentiment analysis. Finally, we discuss the challenges and potential directions for this work. This paper contributes to further understand the value of participation (the “co”) in the context of community-based PD

Design and Poverty : A Review of Contexts, Roles of Poor People, and Methods

Design is essential to fulfil unmet or under-served needs of resource-poor societies, supporting their social and human development. A great deal of design research has been undertaken in such low resource settings, and is discussed under different names, such as ‘community development engineering’, ‘humanitarian engineering’, ‘appropriate technology’, ‘design for development’, ‘design at the Base of the Pyramid’, etc. This has created an important need to know what has been examined and learnt so far and to plan for further investigation. To address this, we review a broad range of literature, with close examination of 30 design studies in this field. This reveals a multifaceted picture, showing a great diversity in investigation and reporting of attributes of context (income, rural and urban, design sectors, countries, and gender), the roles of poor people (consumers, producers, and co-designers), characteristics of research methods employed (e.g. descriptive and prescriptive, data collection methods, qualitative and quantitative aspects, and unit of analysis), and design topics. Based on the review results, we offer recommendations for further research, identifying concerns that researchers ought to have about this field and suggesting ways in which research in this field can be undertaken and reported