Participatory Design in Practice

This paper presents a project for the social development of ICTs, which used a participatory design approach and sought to have a high social impact on a community of craftswomen (embroiderers from Cartago, Colombia). Participating in this project implied active dialogue with the community to recognize the knowledge of each participant and achieve culturally relevant representations materialized in technological artifacts. We posit dialogue, representation and recognition as key elements for developing successful participatory design. In practice, this was achieved through an iterative, incremental and open-ended methodology, whose main feature was engagement by doing. This process of design allowed engineers to recognize the craftswomen’s traditional knowledge and allowed craftswomen to be less afraid of technology. The main resultant artifact was a tangible user interface that facilitates dialogue between fashion designers and embroiderers in the process of designing new embroidery patterns. This and other artifacts that emerged from the activities and dialogues, the level of engagement of the participants, and the convergence points discovered between embroidery and technology, lead us to conclude that the process presented here can be replicated with other craft communities, to reinforce these communities and assist them in generating innovation in their processes and products.