Participatory Design

In recent years there has been something of a renaissance of interest in the idea of Participatory Design (PD) of information systems (IS). Participatory Design might be defined as any attempt to include significant stakeholders, particularly end-users in the process of developing an information system. Lytinnen and Hirschheim (1987) define stakeholders as being ‘all those claimants inside and outside the organisation who have a vested interest in the problem and its solution’. Friedman (1989) believes that this focus on user relations constitutes a distinct phase in the history of computing equivalent in stature to two previous phases focused on hardware and software constraints.