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SUMMARY
* Provides the historical and methodological grounding for understanding participatory design as a methodology
* Describes its research designs, methods, criteria, and limitations
* Provides guidance for applying it to technical communication research
INTRODUCTION
Technical communicators have begun writing quite a bit about participatory design, sometimes with a fervor that rivals that with which we used to write about T-units or think-aloud protocols. The terms participatory design and user-centered design are being broadly applied in the philosophical and pedagogical work of technical communication (Blythe 2001; Henry 1998; Johnson 1998; Salvo 2001; Spinuzzi 2003); methods associated with those terms are being applied in technical communication research (Mirel 1988, 2003; Smart 2003; Smart and Whiting 2002; Smart, Whiting, and DeTienne 2002; Spinuzzi 2002a, 2002c, in press; Wixon and Ramey 1996); and prototypes in particular are often presented as a vital part of iterative usability (see, for example, Barnum 2002, Chapter 4; Smart and Whiting 2002). But that breadth of application has often come at the price of imprecision. It's hard to find a good methodological explanation of participatoiy design.
That lack of a strong methodological explanation is not just technical communication's problem, though. Participatory design is often discussed in human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and related fields as a research orientation or even a field (see Muller 2002, p. 1,052) rather than a methodology. The distinction may be important in principle, but in practice, it has become an escape hatch that allows practitioners to label their work "participatory design" without being accountable to established, grounded precedent.
By looking at that established precedent, I argue, we can define participatory design as a methodology, even if it's a loose one. And I believe it's time we did: Without such a definition, we can't hold ourselves accountable to participatory design or build on a coherent body of knowledge. Consequently, we have trouble applying participatory design rigorously to our technical communication projects, and we tend to think of participatory design as an approach to design rather than a rigorous research methodology.
In this article, I discuss participatory design as a research methodology, characterizing it as a way to understand knowledge by doing, the traditional, tacit, and often invisible (in the sense of Nardi and Engestrom 1999; Muller 1999) ways...