Research methodologies to gain empathy 1 - Participatory Design

I figure it is time to go into specific aspects of the main purpose of Design Thinking – designing products and services! Although it is easy to describe the process, it unfortunately takes lots of experience to deal with the king wicked of wicked problems, human nature. Make no mistake about this particular aspect of the Design Thinking methodology. The best way to get started is to throw yourself off the deep end into projects that were made–up for training purposes. 

That way, the mistakes will purely be for learning, and will cost no one anything much. It is easy to read and ‘learn’ all the theory there is about Design Thinking, but like pretty much everything else on earth and probably the universe, learn by doing, feeling, tasting, smelling – experiencing.

Now that that bit of philosophy is off my chest, let’s get down the participatory Design 101Y.

When should you be using participatory design?

Answer – when you want to know how your users are thinking and what their general sentiments and emotional responses are when they are using your products in their own environments.  It gives you an idea about what the things are that your users consider to be important, what their priorities and ambitions are in life; it tell you what your users consider to be necessary, and they consider to be sufficient.

The thing we all must understand is that the last thing any designer wants to do is to focus directly on the product. Sure, it has to have quality, serve its purpose, be cost effective and all that, but nowadays a product is also about the lifestyle and the ‘glamour’ surrounding it. Is the product green, does it serve a cause; do the users of the product become perceived as being caring, sustainable and wise people?

For instance, when real fur became so distasteful that users started being assaulted because they were part of the process that caused extinction of animals in cruel manners, manufacturers started making fur that looked and felt so real that even these users suffered. It served no purpose, because the innovation worked on a paper, but in reality, the assaulters wanted to be seen as being gallant and caring thugs who would even assault others to protect animals, so the rampage continued. It took a down to earth and designing mind to realise that it was better to create a whole new material and design that would look good and provide warmth and glamour at the same time – thus denim, leather and suede ,material came of age. All because of human emotion.

Another problem with designing today is that you never know what tiny little detail will offend people culturally, and that can be a public relations nightmare for anyone if things go wrong.

Participatory design also negates the need for surveys and interviews to take place. We all know that when it comes to sensitive and private matters, which are the most crucial aspects to consider when designing, people will clam up or will outright lie. If for instance, the design and colour of a material conjures up images of whips for me, and then leads on to images of cruelty and abuse, I am not going to explain why if I had been the victim of abuse. I would instead say, “I don’t like it,” and the business might be making a huge mistake by ignoring my opinion because I never gave the reason, and it just may be that the same image is conjured up by many potential users. Needless to say, the product will fail.

This is why participatory design brings your users and experts together in a setting where everyone works hand son to discuss and build prototype models hands on. Your thoughts, thinking styles and sentiments will manifest in the colours, patterns, functionalities and all the aspects of the product you want to see brought to life. That holds true for everyone else as well. If you have thirty teams building models, then presenting and comparing and publicly evaluating them quickly. Then you will have a very efficient fats prototyping and testing process going on, and when the thirty teams finally and consensually define that final model that they think will be IT (!), you can be pretty sure it would have passed almost every human test there is and be culturally sensitive to human needs and perceptions.

You just might have the next big thing hidden away in the nooks and crannies of your mind.

Participate baby, and design your way to fortune and fame!