Staging a professional participatory design practice

Abstract

Use and users have an important and acknowledged role to most designers of interactive systems. Nevertheless any touch of user hands does not in itself secure development of meaningful artifacts. In this article we stress the need for a professional PD practice in order to yield the full potentiality of user involvement. We suggest two constituting elements of such a professional PD practice. The existence of a shared 'where-to' and 'why' artifact and an ongoing reflection and off-loop reflection among practitioners in the PD process.