Case study example 1: "Cognitive Village”

• Participatory IT design project with older adults in rural areas (Waldenberger et al., 2022)
• Goal: research on everyday practices of older adults in rural areas. The findings were then to be used as a basis for the development of innovative sensor technologies. A multidisciplinary research team from the University of Siegen cooperated with a rural community consisting of several villages. 15 participants were recruited for the project.
• Methods: Several informational meetings were held with key informants and older villagers to identify topics of common interest: Use of apps and home-based training application for fall prevention. The workshops, called appropriation cafés, served as a central place for shared exploration, use, and reflection on technology. The regular appropriation cafés became central to the participatory design process.
• Results: The project pursued different lines of development of digital technology. On the one hand, a "high-tech" pattern recognition project with sensors (algorithms testing) was pursued in conjunction with approaches to fall prevention. On the other hand, participatory development processes were carried out for more "low-tech" based applications such as the village store bulletin board and the church camera.

Case study example 2: Better Outpatient Services for Older People (BOSOP)

• Participatory design project in the UK health service (Bowen et al., 2013)
• Goal: improve healthcare outpatient services for older people. 12-month service improvement project focused on the medical outpatient service for older people at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital (Sheffield, UK), with the intention that some of its outputs would be generalizable to other outpatient departments in the hospital and other hospitals in the wider healthcare trust. Twenty-one patients, carers and healthcare staff formed the core project group, extended by a steering group.
• Methods: experience-based design (EBD). EBD is structured as a four-phase process of patients, carers and healthcare staff capturing and then understanding their lived experiences of healthcare services, working together to improve the service based on this understanding, and then measuring the effects of changes.
• Results: a new template for patient appointment letters, design proposals for new way-finding materials (signage and maps), a proposal for layout of roads surrounding the outpatient building, a video of patient stories to highlight older people’s experiences, and a forum theatre training event to improve outpatient staff awareness of customer care.

Case study example 3: The FASME (Facilitating Administrative Services for Mobile Europeans)

• A Case Study of Participatory Design in E-government Systems (Oostveen & Van Den Besselaar, 2004)
• Goal: project aimed at designing and building an internet and smart card based system to support mobile Europeans with administrative transactions between countries. The EU funded FASME project consisted of seven European cities and municipalities, four university departments, and two consulting companies.
• Methods: interviews, online survey, workshops to get assess the initial situation, parallel technology assessment (TA) studies, prototyping (the developers had put together the first prototype, in interaction with citizens, civil servants, and social scientists that had done the user studies and the TA studies on the social implications of complex e-government systems), testing the prototypes (a series of evaluation sessions, in order to inform the designers of how to continue).
• Results: evaluated system prototype. Variety of traditional PD tools (interviews, a survey, workshops and scenario-based evaluation) was combined with social research and technology assessment.

Sources:

Waldenberger, F., Naegele, G., Kudo, H., & Matsuda, T. (Hrsg.). (2022). Alterung und Pflege als kommunale Aufgabe: Deutsche und japanische Ansätze und Erfahrungen. Springer Fachmedien. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36844-9 Bowen, S., McSeveny, K., Lockley, E., Wolstenholme, D., Cobb, M., & Dearden, A. (2013). How was it for you? Experiences of participatory design in the UK health service. CoDesign, 9(4), 230–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2013.846384 Oostveen, A.-M., & Van Den Besselaar, P. (2004). From small scale to large scale user participation: A case study of participatory design in e-government systems. Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Participatory Design Artful Integration: Interweaving Media, Materials and Practices - PDC 04, 1, 173. https://doi.org/10.1145/1011870.1011891