Doing Participatory Design in a school setting

Abstract

This master thesis report from a project where I have been doing Participatory Design in four different classes. The background area is taxes as many youths have problems understanding why this is relevant for them. I have also given an introduction about automation in the background section as this is relevant for the communication with the public sector and tasks that might need to be solved manually and does not fit into the digital system from the tax-administration. My main theory have been Participatory Design, but I have also included elements from persuasive technologies (captology) to look at how they can complement each other, but with the most focus on how Captology can be used to enrich Participatory Design. Participatory Design is a theory which focus on democracy and power relations During this process I have used four techniques: Tax-question, Future Workshop, Inspiration Cards and Sketching. Together these techniques have made it possible for the students I visited to both learn and become a little more engaged about doing taxes and how it is relevant for them. I have analysed my data from the workshops using Activity Theory, Actor Network Theory in addition to various principles from Participatory Design. I also have a small discussion about the design excluded. Most of my discussions have been circling around my main research question: Explore how it works to do Participatory Design in a school setting. I found that doing Participatory Design in a school setting worked well, but that there are challenges. These challenges consist of supporting the democracy if you divide the class into groups and also how to do the techniques in a group. Based on my experience I made five advices that can be used when doing Participatory Design in a school setting. These are: 1. Give clear and concise tasks 2. Students are motivated by numbers 3. Have back-up plans and be open minded 4. Start with safe/familiar techniques 5. Choose your techniques with care so they are adapted to the class I also developed three secondary research questions: a) Explore how persuasive technologies may contribute to the field of Participatory Design: In the work by Janet Davis (2009) (2010), she used Participatory Design and captology together with a group of university students to enhance recycling at campus. We also did this by cooperating with the students and encourage them to make solutions that would have changed their behaviour towards taxes and how they care about it. In addition to this we also used Foggs behaviour model (Fogg, 2009) to increase ability and motivation in addition to our triggers in the workshop. b) Explore if Participatory Design methods can be used to engage the unengaged: During the workshops I found that that the students in my workshop became more engaged in the topic during the workshops. Participatory Designs focus on democracy and ownership to the solution seemed to boost the students to give more of them and show engagement towards what they made. This corresponds to the article by Nicholas et.al (2012) which also saw an increase in engagement towards mental health issues during their workshops. c) Design a prototype based on the students suggestions The workshops gave me a good foundation for making a prototype. The result became Skappen – an app based on students wishes of features and design. In the prototype I could also include my knowledge about information architecture and incorporate this in the solution. The article written together with my supervisor during this thesis is removerd from them appendix but can be found in the ACM database. It's named "participation for the unengaged"