As companies welcome design-led creativity, they can fight to harvest the full value of human-centric design. A design team’s interactions with consumers may often be restricted to only the advance research and late assessment phases of the design procedure, while the work in between – when thoughts are being triggered, is left to the internal team alone. When this is the scenario, we miss the chance to explore some of the most important and customer-centric solutions. In this blog, I am going to tell you why participatory design is a necessity for designers.
What is Participatory Design?
Participatory design is a strategy that brings consumers into the core of the design procedure. Also known as “co-design”, “cooperative design”, and “co-creation”, it comprises strategies beneficial to both early finding and succeeding ideation stages of a project, where a product-user, experience, or service takes an operative role in cooperative designing solutions. Apprehending how anyone would resolve a problem they face directly often surfaces fresh insights about their experiences. This new info appropriately tells how designers emphasize their efforts, and ideas users propose; suggested ideas help as actionable inspiration does for the solution. Whether designing for customers, service providers, employees, and other audiences, when we proceed past the issues of designing for them and start designing with them, we find the results are more inventive and consumer-centric.
What it is exactly
A strategy to design that lets all investors (eg. employees, customers, partners, citizens) into the design procedure as a mean of more appropriate understanding, association, and most of the time preventing their requirements.
What it’s not
- a) A method to “let your users do the work for you”
- b) A sole dictatorial method or tool
- c) A strongly defined process
- d) A sacred grail
Also Read: HOW EMOTIONAL DESIGNING IS A REAL HELP TO THE DESIGNERS
Role of participatory design
- Rather than inquiring people about what they like or what they don’t like about a brand or service, the method provides a better understanding of customer’s percipience by evoking feelings of appreciation, aversion, or frustration through writing a speculative letter directed at the organization. We can draw the tone and content of the letter, as well as the body gestures when members read it out loud, to create empathy and explore which experiences will be most likely to build, sustain, or hurt brand loyalty as we design potential resolutions.
- Visual relationships authorize people to frame their view and make potentially abstract relations between their experiences with a service or product. This activity actually helps the customers to express their understanding, needs, and experiences in a way words can be failed to elaborate.
