Scaffolding design sessions with teenagers: The PDA approach

Abstract

Participatory design (PD) methods generally provide little guidance/reporting on how the tasks are introduced to participants and how they are supported in carrying them out. It is assumed that researchers or practitioners already have significant expertise in this area and will be capable of adapting any methods for their own specific purpose. This area, of understanding how a participant is guided through a design task, is particularly important for child and teenage participants who may be unwilling, for a range of reasons, to admit they do not understand a task and ask for help. This paper introduces an approach (called Primed Design Activity or PDA) used to help prime participants in a design session, the key aim of the work was to scaffold the introduction and completion of a PD task without biasing the outcome. The study reported in this paper showed that the approach was successful in assisting participants in completing the design task, the paper also draws more general conclusions and lessons learned from the work that are valuable to others running PD sessions.