Designing for Prolonged Mastery. On involving old people in Participatory Design

Abstract

In this paper, we report on a participatory design (PD) process with old users. We discuss how we organized and carried out the process so that our users could participate in the mutual learning and co-construction activities on their own terms. When organizing the process we had to take into account the limited capacity for design participation of our users but also build on the capacities they have. The paper describes our PD approach and what we did to facilitate participation from our old users, emphasizing recruiting, timing, continuity, representativity, and immediacy. The paper also discusses which design decisions the users participated in and how they influenced the design result. We analyse how they brought in design possibilities (choices), selected, concretized and evaluated them, and also how the final design result bears traces of their participation.