Participatory design

The paper reviews some aspects of the procurement and development of large scale systems and finds that there is still a high failure rate, which is especially visible in the public sector. It argues that the Participatory Design (PD) perspective offers cogent explanations for these failures, and can plausibly claim that it would do much better if its paradigm is given a serious chance. Yet members of the PD community seem mostly reluctant to become engaged in such developments, and the actual involvement of PD in these areas remains limited. The paper argues for PD's collective engagement and proposes a two-stage strategy for achieving this. It reviews this agenda from the perspective of PD as a political movement, and argues that this kind of involvement is 'reformist' but defensible. It will be difficult to persuade governments to take on this experimental strategy, but it should be possible.