Positioning Participant Engagement in Participatory Design

The approach of Participatory Design (PD) is the direct involvement of people as participants in the process of shaping design artifacts. Thus the facilitation of participant engagement is a priority for designers and researchers within this field. However, there are few reviews of how PD research interprets and employs the concept of engagement. In this paper, we shall first briefly introduce the related concepts. Then provides a systematic literature review of engagement on 81 PD related (PD, co-design, co-creation, etc.) publications, concerning its diverse perspectives, engaged participants, interpretations, and facilitation. We provide the attributes of participant engagement to further define this concept, as well as a guideline for the strategy of facilitating it. In the end, gaps within the literature have been pointed out as the challenges and opportunities for further work.