The participatory mindset is new to many designers as participants are more than informants. Changing the UCD mindset to the PD mindset turned out to be challenging, but interesting!

A key factor for a successful participatory design process is to ensure, participation throughout the whole process. We did this through co-design and participatory design workshops.

The project resulted in all of the team members receiving grade “A” in the course Participatory design.

Rough/early prototypes and wireframes for a new and more tailored user experience for the part time employees at UIO.

The project focused on ensuring collaborative efforts between designers and participants. One of the key learnings was how we can setup a process where everyone is heard and included in decisions!

Knowing what to do in the alien landscape of participatory design was difficult. The process learned us how to navigate foreign waters, while still getting us where we needed to go!

I found a particular interest in organizing and facilitating design workshops.

The question of how we facilitate well-working and progressive design workshops stayed with me throughout the process, and it laid the groundwork for my master’s thesis!

I also discovered that I flourished in the role of “leading” the workshop!

In PD we focus a lot on how we can ensure, support, and enable participation in designing. We set up several different methods to trigger creativity and ideation to help workshop participants participate.

Together with the participants, we co-designed a prototype in these workshops for a more tailored DFØ experience.