Generally, participation can be defined as the individual or collective involvement of people in decisions that are relevant to them and their lives (Rosenbrock & Hartung, 2012). It can be applied to many domains, e.g., participatory research, participatory management, or participatory design in IT.

Origins of participatory design (PD) go back to the social, political and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. One of the prominent examples of such initiatives is Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) aimed to include rural residents' expertise and perspectives in the planning and administration of development projects and programs. Some designers and design researchers started to look into the ways how these ideas may apply to their own work. Architects and town planners started trying to involve people in the design of various elements of their daily built environments. PD in IT started as a part of the 1970s workplace democracy movement in Europe, and particularly Scandinavia as a reaction to introduction of computers in the workplaces. (Chambers, 1994; Robertson & Simonsen, 2021).

PD can be defined as the process of studying, comprehending, thinking, creating, developing, and promoting mutual learning amongst numerous participants in a collective "reflection-inaction". The participants take on the two primary roles - users and designers. Users aim to communicate their intended goals, and designers attempt to understand the proper technology methods to achieve them. (Robertson & Simonsen, 2021)

Hereby, the two fundamental aspects of PD also reflecting its challenges are as follows (Robertson & Simonsen, 2021):

  1. PD aims to give individuals who will use the technology a voice in its design without requiring them to understand the formal language of technology design. Interactions with prototypes, mock-ups, and other tools that may simulate evolving technologies and future practices are used to achieve this.
  2. The second is that those who are not experienced technology designers would not be able to explain what they want from a design process without understanding what is feasible. Hence, the process of mutual learning between designers and users is crucial to all participants' abilities to envision future technologies and the behaviours in which they might be incorporated .

The meaning of the participation as well as the levels are often explained with the help of participation models, sometimes called “ladders” or “pyramids”. One of the most well-known is Arnstein's (1969) ladder of participation.

| **Citizen Control Delegated Power

Partnership** Citizen Power
**Consultation
Informing
Placation** Tokenism
**Therapy
Manipulation** Non Participation

Figure 1 Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of participation

Later, based on the similar idea, other models and approaches started to appear. (Pretty, 1995) presented the ladder of participation classifying the different ways of participation from low intensity of participation to the high intensity of participation into seven levels of participation.

Table 1. A typology of participation: how people participate in development programs and projects

Typology Characteristics of Each Type
1. Manipulative Participation Participation is simply a pretence, with people's representatives on official boards but who are unelected and have no power.
2. Passive Participation People participate by being told what has been decided or has already happened. lt involves unilateral announcements by an administration or project management without any listening to people's responses. The
information being shared belongs only to external professionals.
3. Participation by Consultation People participate by being consulted or by answering questions. External agents define problems and information gathering processes, and so control analysis. Such a consultative process does not concede any share in decision-making and professionals are under no obligation to take on board people's views.
4. Participation for Material Incentives People participate by contributing resources, for example labour, in return for food, cash or other material incentives. Farmers may provide the fields and labour, but are involved in neither experimentation nor the process of learning. It is very common to see this called participation, yet people have no stake in prolonging technologies or practices when the incentives end.
5. Functional Participation Participation seen by external agencies as a means to achieve project goals, especially reduced costs. People may participate by forming groups to meet predetermined objectives related to the project. Such involvement may be interactive and involve shared decision making, but tends to arise only after major decisions have already been made by external agents. At worst, local people may still only be coopted to serve external goals.
6. Interactive Participation People participate in joint analysis, development of action plans and formation or strengthening of local institutions. Participation is seen as a right, not just the means to achieve project goals. The process involves interdisciplinary methodologies that seek multiple multiple perspectives and
make use of systemic and structured learning processes. As groups take control over local decisions and determine how available resources are used, so they have a stake in maintaining structures or practices.
7. Self-Mobilization People participate by taking initiatives independently of external institutions to change systems. They develop contacts with external institutions for resources and technical advice they need, but retain control over how resources are used. Self-mobilization can spread if governments and NGOs provide an enabling framework of support. Such self-initiated mobilization may or may not challenge existing distributions of wealth and power.

Source: adapted from Pretty (1994), Satterhwaite (1995); Adnan et al (1992), Hart (1992)

In 2007, The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) Spectrum model was developed comprising five levels of public participation: inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and empower (Nabatchi, 2012).