- [Voiceover] Looking at participatory design
from a different perspective.
- Yeah, great, thanks, at Georgia Tech,
I lead the Culture and Technology Lab, the CATLAB,
where we study how cultural practices
with technology impact learning
and we use those understandings
to help design learning technology
and learning environments.
In all of our work at some point or another,
we end up using participatory design methods.
We consider it just part of our normal practice
but the focus of our work
and the theories and foundations that we work from
are certainly from the learning science perspective.
Usually my work is focused on learning sciences, not design,
and I often find myself actually
in this role where, as a learning scientist
who reads a lot and works a lot in design,
I'm bringing in as an advocate to learning sciences
to look more seriously at design study
in the learning sciences.
Jason and I are co-editing a book for the learning sciences
on participatory design.
That's a big part of what my practice is,
but today I'm actually gonna talk
about it in the other direction.
Looking casually I had observed how the learning sciences
might be influencing things happening
in participatory design,
or how the theories could be noted
in those effective participatory design,
and so this investigation is really
how learning sciences can inform
participatory design practices,
rather than the opposite way that I usually do.
Muller's tongue in cheek proposal,
just add water and stir,
I think really highlights the problem
that we frequently find in PD.
We don't exactly know how to ask users
to contribute to the design process,
to really participate in it,
because they are not prepared to
participate in the design process.
I wanted to better understand what factors matter
in the success or failure of participatory design.
Now we often think about the goals of participatory design
as a way for us to learn as designers or developers,
and we're looking for insights or inspiration
for new designs, and we get that by,
spending time with our participants
and having them do activities that
really help us understand their tech knowledge,
the heuristics that they use in their everyday processes.
Getting someone to identify these every day processes,
these practices that they're fluent in
to break those down and to articulate them
to someone else is really difficult,
and when you think about it,
at least from a learning science lens,
you can identify that as metacognition.
Metacognition is thinking about how you think,
and being able to articulate how you think,
and generally when we think about metacognition
we think about it from two components.
First of all, knowledge about cognition,
knowing what we think,
and then second, regulation of cognition,
knowing what strategies or heuristics we use
to reason about a problem or a task,
and this is very much what we're trying to get at
when we're looking at participatory design,
and understand how stakeholders
deal with different issues in their lives.
We're trying to get them to break this apart for us
and really articulate what happens in their mind
as well as in the world.
To better understand how metacognition might play a role
in participatory design, I reviewed all 160 abstracts
from Sid Kai, that mentioned participatory design
in the keywords, so that was a lot of papers to look at.
I didn't read them all, just the abstracts of those,
and then I went through and coded those
that had a presence of different learning constructs.
I identified three learning constructs
that contributed to metacognition
that occurred the most frequently.
There's actually a number of other learning constructs
that I think in future work I would explore,
and those three are reflection,
pre-existing knowledge and zones of proximal development,
and from there I read the papers that I had coded
for each one of these.
I read the whole paper that time,
and I identified the studies that
I thought were the exemplars of learning theory
in that they were really nice
demonstrations, of learning constructs,
that I thought would be easy to explain,
and also to represent a diversity of studies
across domains and techniques that were used.
I'm gonna speak to each of the constructs
and then give examples of how we can see them enacted
in participatory design activities
and the first is reflection,
and reflection is a lot of what you probably think it is,
It's engaging students in that metacognitive process
through reflection by asking a learner
to predict their ability to perform on various tasks
or learners to measure their mastery at something,
and for learners to track what they need to learn,
to gain mastery.
While reflections certainly can be a solitary activity,
learning sciences have identified
that collaborative efforts are well suited
to encourage reflection through articulation.
In one example of reflection, in participatory design,
is the work of Chin and colleagues,
investigating the analytical process
of intelligence analysts.
The activity they had them participate in
was a role playing activity
where they role-played real world scenarios,
like security threats, on stage,
acted out how they might deal with this
or in a public forum,
and afterwards they had a reflective interview with them.
I think that, as I said this encouraged and engaged users
in the analysis and design of their own work,
and from the lens of the learning sciences,
the participant's public performances of their jobs
actually acts like a mirror for them.
They can kind of see,
they're looking a little bit from the audience perspective,
at what their everyday activities are,
and that's very much a reflective practice,
and then the interviews immediately afterwards
help them capture that self awareness
and let them better see their own procedural knowledge
and really break it down.
I think that's a nice example of reflection,
and one of my previous studies,
we were having problems getting participants
to talk about technology with us.
There was a real power imbalance,
between us and the participants,
so we used a method called medium probes,
that required participants to answer
questions about a topic they were
very comfortable talking about.
Everyday for a week using a different medium each day,
a different communication medium,
and then they were asked to participate
in a focus group where they compared
and contrasted technology they use.
In this sense it gave them specific instances
to reflect on technology use,
and it allowed us to overcome that
power imbalance that was going on,
and they could recognize their own knowledge
and sort of their own preference and practices
having those specific moments to look back on.
Again this ties back into the idea of metacognition.
The second construct I wanna talk about
is preexisting knowledge,
and I think we all know that people
come into any new situation
with a whole range of prior knowledge,
their prior skills, and goals, and beliefs,
and pre-existing knowledge very much interprets
how people remember, reason,
or a problem in any given situation.
Oftentimes one of the things we note in learning sciences
is how pre-existing knowledge may be a misconception,
that even though they hold misconceptions
about the way the world works,
they're able to perform their current task
fine with that misconception,
but as you ask them to push out,
it's really difficult for them to
form new task because they're basing it off of
fundamental misconceptions.
I think that participatory design
is a great way to elicit some of these
preconceived notions,
and I would say that's actually often the
job that a designer is trying to get at,
is trying to help find out what those
preconceived notions are.
By making them aware of what
their preconceived notions are,
you may be able to find out where those misconceptions are,
as well, and through design, help address those.
An example of how pre-existing knowledge
might play a role in the participatory design process,
can be found, probably gonna slaughter this name,
I hope they're not here, Oganowski and colleagues,
study of living lab that encourages users.
It was design of a living lab that encourages users
in the lifespan of home entertainment development process.
Participants were originally assigned to attend workshops
based on their technology experience,
and is that you, oh thanks! (laughing)
Sorry, now I'm off,
so they had originally tried to assign
the participants to be in homogenous groups
based on their expertise with technology.
The more expert technologists were in one group,
and the more novice technologists were in another group,
but because of scheduling conflicts and such
sometimes some of the novices were
in groups with the experts.
And this imbalance actually resulted in
some positive outcomes.
The authors note that especially during workshops,
non-experienced users contributed many interesting
and innovative ideas due precisely to
their lack of knowledge about marketable technology
and it seemed from reading the paper
that it was actually, sometimes there
heterogeneous groups that were really useful,
where we had, as Aris and colleagues say
a symmetry of ignorance.
There was people with different kinds of ignorance
who could bring that lack of preconceived notions together,
and help design better together.
Thinking about pre-existing knowledge
in several ways I think, can apply to how we think
about participatory design,
and the third construct I wanna talk about
is zones of proximal development,
and ZPD is a concept originally developed Vygotsky,
which explains that access learners have to new knowledge.
Vygotsky's model the learner can solve certain problems
unaided, and yet can't solve other problems.
In the zone between those two situations
is the zone of proximal development,
and that's where a learner can
solve problems with some guidance,
but some things are just simply outside of their reach.
I see zones of proximal development
actually as really critical
when we're designing participatory design activities
because if we have things outside of the learner's reach,
they're not gonna be able to contribute at all.
If we have things are already something that they know,
they're just gonna cycle around
in those answers they already know,
and the example I'm gonna show you reinforces this.
Sylvanus and Cleland in their study,
had participants trained in dramatic techniques
and then asked them to use those improv techniques
to build scenarios for use in a mobile system,
and what they found is that for a lot of people
even with some guidance, doing these dramatic techniques
and creating performances was just
too difficult for a lot of people,
and was really intimidating for some of the participants.
This example of too big of a leap outside
of the zones of proximal development.
On the other hand they had a number of participants
who are actually PhD students, and researchers,
who knew a lot about the questions
that they were asking,
and with this group they found
the results were very repetitive, in what they already knew.
As they said, "Without real users,
the workshop runs the danger of
spinning in the air and simply iterating
existing assumptions and prejudices
about the context of use."
This is an example of how to not,
pushing participants out of their
zone of proximal development,
by not challenging them,
can produce unproductive participatory design as well.
In conclusion, participatory design,
often enacts activities
that I actually think are exemplars of learning,
and I think that all of us should use
more participatory design activities in our classrooms,
but I do also think that the learning sciences
can lend something to participatory design,
by giving them some theories and constructs
that could really help new people,
new designers, to use these methods,
getting some things to hold on to,
how do I do this well?
And also maybe provide some metrics
for a designer to consider
before they launch something in the field.
The next steps, this is very very early work
that I'm doing in this arena,
and I think the next steps would be
more extensive reviews of other participatory design studies
but also I'd like to start interviewing researchers.
I particularly wanna learn about failures
of participatory design,
so if any of you have failures,
please take down my address and tell me all about them,
and I also think there's a chance here
to create some PD activities that explicitly
either leverage or ignore these kind of learning constructs
to see what happens, and how much this holds up,
as we use it in the real world.
That's all I got, thank you.
(audience applause)