Creating, Sustaining and Optimising the Collaborative Realm for Participatory Design

Participatory design attempts to actively involve beneficiaries of design in the design process towards ensuring that the designed product/service meets their needs. This calls for an integration of the domain of designer with the domain of the user to create a realm of collaboration between the designer and the user for an effective involvement of the user in the design process. There is also the need to, in addition to creating the collaborative realm, also focus on sustaining the realm and optimizing the output of the realm. This paper recognizes the key place of decision-making in the design process and proposes a conceptual model, based on various concepts, towards creating sustaining and optimizing a collaborative realm for an effective participatory design. The model primarily relies on various theories on participatory design, motivation and collaboration. Significantly the model ends with a proposal for a user- involvement framework that incorporates a lean decision-making system such as Choosing By Advantages.