More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

article

Involving users in the wild-Participatory product development in and with online communities

Authors:

Volker WulfAuthors Info & Claims

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Volume 71, Issue 5

Pages 570 - 589

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2013.01.003

Published: 01 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

In its traditional stance, participatory design (PD) is centred on certain work/application settings and is concerned with the involvement of representative users from these contexts. Nevertheless, current web technologies enable new forms of distributed participation which might allow PD processes to be implemented in a broader and flexible way, but may at the same time raise new issues in relation to participation. In this paper, we report on a Participatory Product Development project, using social technologies, where new issues were raised-a large population of heterogeneous and globally distributed users; a range of personal and institutional purposes, and the use of these technologies in a largely untested environment. We will reflect on insights that we gathered by through observation of and participation in a software development process driven and influenced by members of an existing online community. By means of participatory observation, analysis of the use of online tools and through semi- structured interviews we identified issues around different notions of timeliness and of process structures that are related to different roles, responsibilities and levels of experience. Our results indicate that the involvement of heterogeneous users in such a context needs to be handled carefully, for the reasons we set out. The role of user representatives acting for a broader online community can become crucial when managing heterogeneity, formulating acceptable compromises and- perhaps most crucially- dealing with different professional and 'hobbyist' worldviews. Additionally, we found that the use of standard web technologies only partly support online participation processes. PD 'in the wild' needs to be better embedded in use situations and environments (e.g., by linking discussion and design space, using feedback tools, continuous reflection of the current state of development) rather than refining participatory design as a meta-process separate from use.

References

[1]

Lest we forget-the European field study tradition and the issue of conditions of work in CSCW research. In ECSCW. v2011. 213-232.

[2]

Users and developers mediation in an open source software community: boundary spanning through cross participation in online discussions. International Journal of Human Computer Studies. v66 i7. 558-570.

[3]

Usability and interaction design-new challenges for the Scandinavian tradition. Behaviour Information Technology. v27. 293-300.

[4]

Bjoergvinsson, E., Ehn, P., Hillgren, P. Participatory design and democratizing innovation. In: Proceedings of PDC. 2010, pp. 41-50.

[5]

Boehner, K., Vertesi, J., Sengers, P. Dourish, P. (2007): How HCI interprets the probes. In: Proceedings of the CHI'07, pp. 1077-1086.

[6]

Participatory it Design. Designing for Business and Workplace Realities. MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[7]

The SAGE Handbook of Grounded Theory. Sage, London.

[8]

Carter, S., Mankoff, J. (2005). When participants do the capturing: the role of media in diary studies. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Portland, OR, USA.

[9]

Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

[10]

Dittrich, Y., Eriksén, S., Hansson, C. (2002). PD in the Wild: Evolving Practices of Design in Use, Proc. PDC 2002, pp. 124-134.

[11]

Ehn, P. (2008). Participation in design things. In: Proceedings of Participatory Design Conference, PDC'08, (Bloomington, IN, USA, 2008).

[12]

Using email and WWW in a distributed participatory design project. SIGGROUP Bulletin. v20 i1. 10-15.

[13]

Seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding: enriching participatory design with informed participation. In: Binder, T., Gregory, J., Wagner, J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference, Malmö University, Sweden, CPSR, Palo Alto, CA. pp. 135-143.

[14]

Fischer, G., Scharff, E. (2000). Meta-design-design for designers. In: Boyarski, D., Kellogg, W. (Eds.), Proc. of the Third International Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, New York City, August 2000, ACM, pp. 396-405.

[15]

How communities support innovative activities: an exploration of assistance and sharing among end-users (with Nikolaus Franke). Research Policy. v32 i1. 157-178.

[16]

The Locales Framework: Understanding and Designing for Wicked Problems. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Amsterdam.

[17]

Community based innovation: how to integrate members of virtual communities into new product development. Electronic Commerce Research. v6 i1. 57-73.

[18]

Design: cultural probes. Interactions. v6 i1. 21-29.

[19]

Glaser, B., Strauss, A. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research, Chicago.

[20]

Basics of Grounded Theory Analysis: Emergence v Forcing. Sociology Press.

[21]

Graham, C. Rouncefield, M. (2008). Probes and participation. In: Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008 (PDC '08). Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN, USA, pp. 194-197.

[22]

. In: Greenbaum, J., Kyng, M. (Eds.), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, NJ.

[23]

Hagen, P., Robertson, T. (2010). Social technologies: challenges and opportunities for participation. In: Participatory Design Conference, PDC'2010, Sydney, Australia.

[24]

The relationship of action research to human-computer interaction. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction. v18 i3.

[25]

Public participation in proprietary software development through user roles and discourse. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. v66 i7. 545-557.

[26]

Hess, J., Offenberg, S., Pipek, V. (2008). Community-driven development as participation?-Involving user communities in a software design process. In: Participatory Design Conference-PDC'08, Bloomington, IN, USA, 2008.

[27]

Hess, J., Doerner, C., Pipek, V., Wiedenhoefer, T. (2011). InfraCapture: Capture and Share Description of Issues. In: Workshop on Appropriation and Creative Use: Linking User Studies and Design, CHI'2011, Vancouver, CA, 2011.

[28]

Hess, J., Wan, L., Ley, B. Wulf, V. (2012). In-situ everywhere: a feedback infrastructure for cross platform home-IT. In: Proc. of the 10th European Conference on Interactive TV, 2012.

Digital Library

[29]

Hess, J. Wulf. V. (2009). Explore social behavior around rich-media: a structured diary study. In: Proceedings of the Seventh European Conference on European Interactive Television Conference (EuroITV '09), ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 215-218.

[30]

Customer-developer links in software development. Communications of the ACM. v38 i5. 33-44.

[31]

The collective resource approach: the Scandinavian experience. Scandinavian Journal Information Systems. v6 i1. 71-84.

[32]

Successful industrial products from customer ideas. Journal of Marketing. v42 i1. 39-49.

[33]

Lead users: a source of novel product concepts. Management Science. v32. 791-805.

[34]

Why do users contribute to firm-hosted user communities? The case of computer-controlled music instruments. Organization Science. v17 i2006. 45-63.

[35]

Consumers as co-developers: learning and innovation outside the firm. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management. v15 i3. 363-384.

[36]

The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. 2005. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[37]

End-user Development. Springer, Netherlands.

[38]

Mansour, O., Abusalah, M. Askenäs, L. (2011). Wiki-based community collaboration in organizations. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T '11), ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 79-87.

[39]

Muller, M.J., Kuhn, S. (1993). Participatory Design. Communications of the ACM.

[40]

Participatory design: the third space in HCI. In: Jacko, J.A., Sears, A. (Eds.), The Human Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ. pp. 1051-1068.

[41]

Overcoming mass confusion: collaborative customer co-design in online communities. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. v10 i4.

[42]

Pipek, V., Syrjänen, A.-L. (2006). Infrastructuring as capturing in-situ design. In: Seventh Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems, Association of Information Systems, Venice, Italy.

[43]

Infrastructuring: towards an integrated perspective on the design and use of information technology. Journal of the Association of Information System (JAIS). v10 i5. 306-332.

[44]

Networked: The New Social Operating System. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

[45]

Randall, D., Rouncefield, M. Fieldwork for Design. Berlin: Springer.

[46]

Using Ethnography in Contextural Design. Communications of the ACM. v40 i7. 82-88.

[47]

Re-using users: co-create and co-evaluate. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 10. v2-3 i2006. 148-152.

[48]

Institutional ecology, 'translations' and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science. v19 i4. 387-420.

[49]

Star, S.L., Bowker, G.C., 2002. "How to infrastructure". In: Lievrouw, L.A., Livingstone, S. (Eds.), Handbook of New Media - Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs, SAGE Publication, London, UK, pp. 151-162.

[50]

Stevens, G., Pipek, V., Wulf, V. (2009). Appropriation infrastructure: supporting the design of usages. In: de Ruyter, B., Pipek; V., Rosson. M.B., Wulf, V. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on End User Development (IS-EUD 2009), Springer, LNCS, Heidelberg 2009, pp. 50-69.

[51]

Appropriation infrastructure: mediating appropriation and production work, special issue to end user development. Journal of Organizational and End User Computing. v22 i2. 58-81.

[52]

Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. second ed. Sage, London.

[53]

Wagner C., Prasarnphanich, P. (2007). Innovating collaborative content creation: the role of Altruism and Wiki Technology. In: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS '07), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA.

Digital Library

[54]

The Internet in Everyday Life. John Wiley, New York.

[55]

Getting clear about the role of communities in open innovation. Industry and Innovation. v15. 3

[56]

Component-based tailorability: towards highly flexible software applications. International Journal on Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS). v66 i1. 1-22.

Cited By

Fabijan ADmitriev PMcFarland CVermeer LHolmström Olsson HBosch J(2018)Experimentation growthJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.211330:12Online publication date: 12-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/smr.2113
Maceli M(2016)Co-design in the wildProceedings of the 14th Participatory Design Conference: Full papers - Volume 110.1145/2940299.2940300(161-170)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2940299.2940300

Recommendations

The role of design fiction in participatory design processes
NordiCHI '18: Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

Participatory design is in essence very malleable as any design technique could lend itself to it, as long as users and stakeholders are involved. Design fictions however, have more often been used as either a vehicle for critical designs, or as a sheer ...
Participatory Design & End-User Development: Building Bridges
NordiCHI '24 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

Empowering end-users to be actively involved in the design, development and implementation of systems is a shared goal of the participatory design and end-user development communities. Yet, both communities have developed largely separately, both ...
Participatory design in community computing contexts: tales from the field
PDC 04: Proceedings of the eighth conference on Participatory design: Artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices - Volume 1

As technology becomes more embedded in our daily lives, there is a great deal of hope about the use of information technology to achieve positive community outcomes like increasing access to local information, promoting civic engagement, and creating ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image International Journal of Human-Computer Studies

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies Volume 71, Issue 5

May, 2013

131 pages

ISSN:1071-5819

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © Elsevier Ltd © 2013.

Publisher

Academic Press, Inc.

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 May 2013

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
0
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)0
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 06 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Fabijan ADmitriev PMcFarland CVermeer LHolmström Olsson HBosch J(2018)Experimentation growthJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.211330:12Online publication date: 12-Dec-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/smr.2113
Maceli M(2016)Co-design in the wildProceedings of the 14th Participatory Design Conference: Full papers - Volume 110.1145/2940299.2940300(161-170)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2940299.2940300

View Options

View options

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents