Scripting: an exploration of designing for participation over time with communities

Abstract

Designing participation over time is a challenge that is regularly discussed in the fields of Participatory Design (PD) and Codesign. This paper describes two living labs-cases concerned with designing IT during long-term engagements with communities. Both labs aim to enable participatory exchanges after the designer leaves and are thus confronted with challenges that transcend the time of the traditional design ‘project’. We addressed these challenges via defining the IT design process as scripting, which is a process that better articulates the participants’ different voices and timelines. In this process three types of scripts are made, supported by the facilitator role: personal scripts as portrayals of individuals’ views on issues in the community and timelines to address these; community scripts aspiring to combine personal scripts into pluralistic views on the community and scripts for action as ways to rehearse how the community might unfold after the designer leaves. Key to this approach is that diverse people’s views and timelines play a role in co-constructing IT platforms that support participation in the community over time. By creating IT tools that are enabled by and support scripting, designing for participation over time becomes a pluralistic endeavour.