Participatory design is an approach to design that attempts to actively involve the end users in the design process to help ensure that the product designed meets their needs and is usable. It is rooted in work with trade unions in several Scandinavian countries in the 1960s and 1970s; its ancestry also includes Action Research and Sociotechnical Design.Web Page on Participatory Design on the site of CPSR. Accessed 13 April 2006.

In the English-speaking world, the term has currency mainly in the world of software development, especially in circles connected to Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), who have put on a series of Participatory Design Conferences. It overlaps with the Extreme Programming concept of User Centred Design, but (possibly because of its European trade union origins) the Participatory Design tradition puts more emphasis on the involvement of a broad population of users rather than a small number of user representatives.

In participatory design end-users (putative, potential or future) are invited to cooperate with researchers and developers during an innovation process. Potentially, they participate during several stages of an innovation process: they participate during the initial exploration and problem definition both to help define the problem and to focus ideas for solution, and during development, they help evaluate proposed solutions.

Participatory design can be seen as a move of end-users into the world of researchers and developers, whereas empathic design can be seen as a move of researchers and developers into the world of end-users.

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