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Comment by petervandijck | Hacker News Reader

I always felt participatory design was never worked out or explained as well as customer development.

They were definitely on to something, but the focus seemed wrong (have your customers help you design your product). Customer development's focus is straight on (have a hypothesis, test it with customers and pivot). Much stronger way of thinking about the process.

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I agree with you. Participatory design is not the same as testing a Hypothesis, which is what CD is about. The easiest way of thinking about it is what Henry Ford said "If had listened to my customers I would have bread faster horses". What Ford did was look at the Activities of his customers (need to go from a to b faster), and their needs and then came up with a Hypothesis which was the car.

He still researched the market, he still listened to his customers, but he did not use the customers solution, which is what Participatory design is about.

Participatory design is not about having your customer design for you, which is a common misconception. If it was, then every PD project would end up like the Homer Simpson car.

It is about engaging the user as an equal and not treating them as a abstract problem you are designing for. As I said, it's about including them in the design process in a way that you come up with a design that truly suits their needs.

The main problem is that a lot of people see PD as a philosophy rather than a method. I tried to suggest concrete methods you could use PD to build better products. The research is here - http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~tch/

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