The Participatory design movement in the United States is, in many ways, growing out of the Scandinavian or worker-oriented design approach in Europe. This article discusses some of the roots of this movement and goes on to focus on ways that a ‘home grown’, or typically American brand of pragmatic system design can develop in the US. The road toward participatory design in the United States ha...

Given the rapid growth of participatory media content such as blogs, user created videos, and podcasts, there is a need to understand and answer the following kind of questions: What is participatory media good for? Does it improve the effectiveness of news media? If so, then why? What are the underlying processes of human communication that can explain how people perceive and interpret the inf...

The ubiquity of the various cheap embedded sensors on mobile devices, for example cameras, microphones, accelerometers, and so on, is enabling the emergence of participatory sensing applications. While participatory sensing can benefit the individuals and communities greatly, the collection and analysis of the participators’ location and trajectory data may jeopardize their privacy. PS takes th...

The idea of so-called “Participatory Budgeting” (PB) has recently re-entered the modern political discourse. Major metropoles, such as New York, are making progress beyond mere piloting by paving road for mandatory PB with new legislation, while communities various sizes and politicians ranks all around world aim to follow suit in an attempt maintain image democratic progress. This paper shall ...

BACKGROUND Epidemiology has contributed in many ways to identifying various risk factors for disease and to promoting population health. However, there is a continuing debate about the ability of epidemiology not only to describe, but also to provide results which can be better translated into public health practice. It has been proposed that participatory research approaches be applied to epid...

This chapter seeks to contribute to the ongoing debates in the domain of Participatory Design by discussing the various trends and questions within the context of the Health Information Systems Programme (HISP) initiative ongoing over nearly two decades. The focus in this chapter is to discuss issues of Participatory Design during the course of the design, developme t, implementation and scalin...