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Participatory design (originally co-operative design or design participation, now often co-design and also co-creation) is an approach to design that attempts to involve a variety of stakeholders (e.g. employees, partners, customers, citizens, end users) in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usability. Participatory design is an approach which is focused on processes and procedures of design and is not a design style. The term is used in a variety of fields, e.g. software design, urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, sustainability, graphic design, industrial design, planning, and health services development, as a way of creating environments that are more satisfactory and appropriate to their inhabitants' and users' practical, cultural, emotional and spiritual needs. It is also one approach to placemaking.
Participatory design has been used in many settings and at various scales. For some, this approach has a political dimension of user empowerment and democratization. This inclusion of external parties in the design process does not excuse designers of their responsibilities. In their article "Participatory Design and Prototyping", Wendy Mackay and Michel Beaudouin-Lafon support this point by stating that "a common misconception about participatory design is that designers are expected to abdicate their responsibilities as designers and leave the design to users. This is never the case: designers must always consider what users can and cannot contribute."
In the broader discourse on collaborative processes, terminology such as co-design, co-creation, and urban co-creation is often debated and differentiated. For example, In "Co-designing for Society", Deborah Szebeko and Lauren Tan list various precursors of co-design, and differentiate co-design from participatory design because co-design "includes all stakeholders of an issue not just the users, throughout the entire process from research to implementation."
Similarly, Maria Gabriela Sanchez and Lois Frankel proposed that "Co-design may be considered . . . as an interdisciplinary process that involves designers and non-designers in the development of design solutions" and that "the success of the interdisciplinary process depends on the participation of all the stakeholders in the project".
According to Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Stappers "Co-creation is a very broad term with applications ranging from the physical to the metaphysical and from the material to the spiritual", with co-design being a specific instance of co-creation.
Within urban studies, urban co-creation has been proposed to describe participatory processes that are genuinely inclusive, emphasizing the active, bottom-up involvement of residents, communities, and grassroots organizations in shaping urban environments. Bruno Seve (2022) argue that urban co-creation encompasses a wide range of practices—including appropriation of space, self-construction, guerrilla gardening, and tactical urbanism—that challenge traditional top-down models. They contend that the term participation alone is ambiguous and insufficient to describe the diversity of collaborative practices and dynamics in urban transformation.
As described by Sanders and Stappers, one could position co-design as a form of human-centered design across two different dimensions. One dimension is the emphasis on research or design, another dimension is how much people are involved. Therefore, there are many forms of co-design, with different degrees of emphasis on research or design and different degrees of stakeholder involvement. For instance, one of the forms of co-design which involves stakeholders strongly early at the front end design process in the creative activities is generative co-design. Generative co-design is increasingly being used to involve different stakeholders, such as patients, care professionals and designers actively in the creative making process to develop health services.
/ref> which took a broad view of emerging practices of participation in design, from radical technology and computer aids in architectural design to inclusive design for disabled users.
The level of participation is an important issue. One of the most influential works on citizen participation is the article "A Ladder of Citizen Participation", published by Sherry Arnstein in 1969. In this paper, Arnstein outlines a model consisting of eight levels of participation, ranging from manipulation to citizen control, the latter representing full and genuine participation. At a minimum public workshops and hearings have now been included in almost every planning endeavour. Yet this level of consultation can simply mean information about change without detailed participation. Involvement that 'recognises an active part in plan making' has not always been straightforward to achieve. Participatory design has attempted to create a platform for active participation in the design process, for end users.
The Scandinavian projects developed an action research approach, emphasizing active co-operation between researchers and workers of the organization to help improve the latter's work situation. While researchers got their results, the people whom they worked with were equally entitled to get something out of the project. The approach built on people's own experiences, providing for them resources to be able to act in their current situation. The view of organizations as fundamentally harmonious—according to which conflicts in an organization are regarded as pseudo-conflicts or "problems" dissolved by good analysis and increased communication—was rejected in favor of a view of organizations recognizing fundamental "un-dissolvable" conflicts in organizations (Ehn & Sandberg, 1979).
In the Utopia project (Bødker et al., 1987, Ehn, 1988), the major achievements were the experience-based design methods, developed through the focus on hands-on experiences, emphasizing the need for technical and organizational alternatives (Bødker et al., 1987).
The parallel Florence project (Gro Bjerkness & Tone Bratteteig) started a long line of Scandinavian research projects in the health sector. In particular, it worked with nurses and developed approaches for nurses to get a voice in the development of work and IT in hospitals. The Florence project put gender on the agenda with its starting point in a highly gendered work environment.
The 1990s led to a number of projects including the AT project (Bødker et al., 1993) and the EureCoop/EuroCode projects (Grønbæk, Kyng & Mogensen, 1995).
Later, it became a major challenge to participatory design to embrace the fact that much technology development no longer happens as design of isolated systems in well-defined communities of work (Beck, 2002).
Research suggests that designers create more innovative concepts and ideas when working within a co-design environment with others than they do when creating ideas on their own. Companies also increasingly rely on their user communities to generate new product ideas, marketing them as "user-designed" products to the wider consumer market; consumers who are not actively participating but observe this user-driven approach show a preference for products from such firms over those driven by designers. This preference is attributed to an enhanced identification with firms adopting a user-driven outlook, with consumers feeling empowerment even if being only indirectly involved in the design process, leading to a preference for the firm's products.
Many local governments require community consultation in any major changes to the built environment. Community involvement in the planning process is almost a standard requirement in most strategic changes. Community involvement in local decision making creates a sense of empowerment. The City of Melbourne Swanston Street redevelopment project received over 5000 responses from the public allowing them to participate in the design process by commenting on seven different design options.The City of Melbourne Have Your Say May 14, 2009 While the City of Yarra recently held a "Stories in the Street"Andrea Cook [2] Stories in the Street May 14, 2009 consultation, to record peoples ideas about the future of Smith Street. It offered participants a variety of mediums to explore their opinions such as mapping, photo surveys and storytelling. Although local councils are taking positive steps towards participatory design as opposed to traditional top down approaches to planning, many communities are moving to take design into their own hands.
Portland, Oregon City Repair ProjectCity Repair "What is City repair" May 13, 2009 was a form of participatory design involving the community co-designing problem areas together to make positive changes to their environment. It involved collaborative decision-making and design without traditional involvement from local government or professionals but instead run on volunteers from the community. The process has created successful projects such as intersection repair, which saw a misused intersection develop into a successful community square.
In Malawi, a UNICEF WASH programme trialled participatory design development for latrines in order to ensure that users participate in creating and selecting sanitation technologies that are appropriate and affordable for them. The process provided an opportunity for community members to share their traditional knowledge and skills in partnership with designers and researchers.Cole, B. (2013) ' Participatory Design Development for Sanitation', Frontiers of CLTS: Innovations and Insights 1, Brighton: IDS
Participatory design can be seen as a move of end-users into the world of researchers and developers, whereas empathic design can be seen as a move of researchers and developers into the world of end-users. There is a very significant differentiation between user-design and user-centered design in that there is an emancipatory theoretical foundation, and a systems theory bedrock (Kristo Ivanov, 1972, 1995), on which user-design is founded.
Participatory work in software development has historically tended toward two distinct trajectories, one in Scandinavia and northern Europe, and the other in North America. The Scandinavian and northern European tradition has remained closer to its roots in the labor movement (e.g., Beck, 2002; Bjerknes, Ehn, and Kyng, 1987). The North American and Pacific rim tradition has tended to be both broader (e.g., including managers and executives as "stakeholders" in design) and more circumscribed (e.g., design of individual features as contrasted with the Scandinavian approach to the design of entire systems and design of the work that the system is supposed to support) (e.g., Beyer and Holtzblatt, 1998; Noro and Imada, 1991). However, some other has tended to combine the two approaches (Bødker et al., 2004; Muller, 2007).
Though not completely synonymous, research methods of Participatory Design can be defined under Participatory Research (PR): a term for research designs and frameworks using direct collaboration with those affected by the studied issue. More specifically, Participatory Design has evolved from Community-Based Research and Participatory Action Research (PAR). PAR is a qualitative research methodology involving: "three types of change, including critical consciousness development of researchers and participants, improvement of lives of those participating in research, and transformation of societal 'decolonizing' research methods with the power of healing and social justice". Participatory Action Research (PAR) is a subset of Community-Based Research aimed explicitly at including participants and empowering people to create measurable action. PAR practices across various disciplines, with research in Participatory Design being an application of its different qualitative methodologies. Just as PAR is often used in social sciences, for example, to investigate a person's lived experience concerning systemic structures and social power relations, Participatory Design seeks to deeply understand stakeholders' experiences by directly engaging them in the problem-defining and solving processes. Therefore, in Participatory Design, research methods extend beyond simple qualitative and quantitative data collection. Rather than being concentrated within data collection, research methods of Participatory Design are tools and techniques used throughout co-designing research questions, collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data, knowledge dissemination, and enacting change.
When facilitating research in Participatory Design, decisions are made in all research phases to assess what will produce genuine stakeholder participation. By doing so, one of Participatory Design's goals is to dismantle the power imbalance existing between 'designers' and 'users.' Applying PR and PAR research methods seeks to engage communities and question power hierarchies, which "makes us aware of the always contingent character of our presumptions and truths... truths are logical, contingent and intersubjective... not directed toward some specific and predetermined end goal... committed to denying us the (seeming) firmness of our commonsensical assumptions". Participatory design offers this denial of our "commonsensical assumptions" because it forces designers to consider knowledge beyond their craft and education. Therefore, a designer conducting research for Participatory Design assumes the role of facilitator and co-creator.
Other researchers suggest that participation in urban contexts is not merely a technical procedure initiated by experts or institutions, but rather a multifaceted and dynamic practice embedded in the transformation of cities. It encompasses not only planned participatory processes led by professionals—such as community planning or design workshops—but also grassroots and collective actions including self-building, urban gardening, occupation of vacant lots, street markets, protests, and dissident urban interventions. These practices are often rooted in ecological awareness, care, and a shared claim to the urban commons, as exemplified by initiatives like guerrilla gardening, tactical urbanism, and community-run spaces. Far from being marginal, these actions express citizens' direct engagement in shaping the city and reflect diverse motivations, ranging from ecological justice to cultural identity and social solidarity. Understood in this expanded sense, urban co-creation encompasses the full spectrum of participatory practices—whether formal, informal, or insurgent—that contribute to the collective making of urban space.
Successful examples of participatory design are critical because they demonstrate the benefits of this approach and inspire others to adopt it. A lack of funding or interest can cause participatory projects to revert to practices where the designer initiates and dominates rather than facilitating design by the community.
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