This focus section explores the opportunities of design anthropology in participatory design as an approach to research and design in an increasingly global and digital world. Traditionally, ethnography has been used in Participatory design to research real-life contexts and challenges, and as ways to involve people in defining user-needs and design opportunities. As the boundaries between dive...

OBJECTIVE Cultural and health service obstacles affect the quality of pregnancy care that women from vulnerable populations receive. Using a participatory design approach, the Stress in Pregnancy: Improving Results with Interactive Technology group developed specifications for a suite of eHealth applications to improve the quality of perinatal mental health care. MATERIALS AND METHODS We esta...

Participatory mapping has emerged as a dominant paradigm in participatory approaches to international planning, conservation management, and community development in the Global South and is considered a technology with emancipatory potentials for subordinate or marginalized groups. However, the literature on community-based mapping has been criticized for its dualistic approach to power, cultur...

The authors discuss strategies used and lessons learned by a health foundation during development of a community health assessment model incorporating community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches. The assessment model comprises three models incorporating increasing amounts of CPBR principles. Model A combines local-area analysis of quantitative data, qualitative information (key inf...

In this paper we explore the similarities and differences of participatory design and action research in a crossdisciplinary fashion. We briefly outline two distinct studies: (1) a design study that examines mobile interactions of backpackers, and (2) an urban sociology study to better understand social networks of apartment residents. The first study follows a participatory design approach. Th...

• Participation by civil society in public expenditure management promises to improve social and economic outcomes while increasing confidence in public institutions. • Participatory budgeting (PB) programmes depend on the effective engagement of three key domestic stakeholders: governments, civil society and legislatures. Participatory budgeting cannot be imposed. • The successful execution of...

In this paper an approach for coupling real-time control and socio-economic issues in participatory river basin planning is presented through a case study. It relies on the use of Bayesian Networks (Bns) to describe in a probabilistic way the behaviour of farmers within an irrigation district in response to some planning actions. Bayesian Networks are coupled with classical stochastic hydrologi...

This paper proposes User Participatory Sketching as a complementary approach to user requirements gathering methods, applies the approach in an empirical study and investigates its potential benefits in the early interaction design stage. The findings from the case study suggest the proposed “User Participatory Sketching” can complement conventional user requirement gathering techniques in the ...

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper explores how a decision support system (DSS) can be developed that complies with the critical success factors of such systems. A participatory approach is used to develop Pigs2win, a DSS for Flemish pig farms. Pigs2win uses frontier analysis for comparative farm analysis. The participatory approach influences the selection of stakeholders, objective setting and ...

FOREWORD This thematic paper presents conceptual and methodological issues related to the use of communication to facilitate participation among stakeholders in natural resource management (NRM) initiatives. It also introduces a collection of papers that focus on participatory development communication (PDC) and NRM, particularly in Asia and Africa. These papers will be published in a single vo...