Towards Participatory Design: The Head and the Heart Revisited

Participatory design is a movement among system developers to encourage active participation in the design process by people using computer systems. Participatory design is not one set of methods or beliefs, but rather an approach that tries to borrow practices from other areas and apply them to the workplace in order to enable people to speak out about their needs. This article discusses some of the basic ideas and their relationship to the women's movement.