Participatory Refinement of Participatory Outcomes: Students Iterating over the Design of an Interactive Mobile Learning Application

Significant research efforts have been put in refining concept/requirements of novel systems innovated by experts or crowds. However, there is scarce evidence of refinement techniques developed for and/or applied to the concept/requirements of novel systems innovated with participatory design. Arguably, general idea assessment and refinement techniques can be applied to participatory innovations. But including expert-centered techniques in a pure participatory project violates the basic philosophy of user-centeredness. In this work, the authors report on conception and application of a participatory refinement technique applied to refine the outcomes of participatory innovation/design. The reported participatory refinement experiment is performed on the design of a case tool—Jeliot Mobile—innovated earlier through participatory workshops. The authors draw several implications from the experiment. First, the need of a refinement technique for participatory innovation/design is established by the observation that a large number of ideas from the original concept are eliminated. Second, the difference of opinion between innovators and refiners show that different end-users from the same population may diverge in creativity differently. Thus, some ideas generated during ideation may be seems suitable to conceiver at that moment, but may not be beneficial to the society at large. Third, the inter-rater consistency of refinement establishes that end-user can refine, contrary to the popular belief that only experts can evaluate and refine due to their previous knowledge.