Identifying executive principles in participatory design

Participatory design is one of the practical approaches in many fields of design, including industrial design. This approach generally refers to activities in which all stakeholders find the authority and power to use their ideas to design new solutions simultaneously. But participation and cooperation with users have always been involved with many challenges. So researchers do a large number of studies to provide solutions in this field by introducing new methods. Introducing the method has become one of the most common ways to introduce this approach in academic activities. In other words, methods as a field constitute most of the current knowledge space about participatory design. The volume of these studies is so broad that it probably confuses the relevant researchers at the beginning of their work. But despite this wide range of researches, the authors did not find a comprehensive research with the aim of accessing an integrated set of methods or principles. For this reason, the main question of this research is related to identifying the basic principles in the implementation of the participatory design project and investigating the relationship between these principles. In this regard, this study aims to present a set of general principles for implementing the participatory design approach and to reach a new and integrated interpretation in this field, which is done through the synthesis of the results of previous studies. In this direction, a qualitative study using a meta-synthesis method has been chosen as the research method which is carried out through three stages of coding, namely, open, axial, and selective coding. The meta-synthesis method is a type of qualitative study that uses the findings of other qualitative research in a specific field as data. This method can help social science researchers in developing and creating theories by synthesizing the results of previous studies. In the first step, searching for documents, based on four criteria including appropriate keywords (participatory design, principles, method, model, and framework), historical range (from 2000 to 2022), databases (Scopus, Taylor & Francis, ScienceDirect, ACM, DL) and the type of documents (books, articles, and treatises) was done, and 56 valid documents were obtained based on this. In the next step, among these documents, based on two criteria (the quality of the studies and the comprehensiveness of the proposed method, model, principles, or frameworks), 10 documents, including 9 articles and 1 book, were selected as the final input documents for conducting the study. Finally, as a result of the synthesis of the selected studies, eight categories were obtained as the implementation principles of participatory design, which are: clarifying participation, empowering participants, creating a platform for participation, matching the components of participation, stimulating participation, justice in participation, managing the results of participation and sustainable participation. In the end, the conceptual relationship between these categories was examined and eight specific types of relationships between the categories were identified. Also, by presenting examples of participatory projects, the application and fields of use of the eight proposed categories were explained.