Audience
This toolkit was designed for researchers working in collaboration with practitioners, community members, and young people. However, these resources are broadly applicable to designers, educators, and diverse practitioners, who are encouraged to adapt them to best meet their unique contexts. These tools are designed for those interested in genuine collaboration, where research, design, and teaching is not done on or to subjects, but rather, activities are enacted with collaborators. The toolkit uses this term, “collaborators,” to indicate the active role and contribution of all team members.
How to Use
The resources in this toolkit are organized into 5 categories: (1) Build Trusted Teams: What does trust look like in participatory design? How can we build trust to do our work together? (2) Identify and Understand: What do we need to know about the places, the histories, and the people with whom we are working and for whom the work is intended to benefit? How do we learn what we need to know?, (3) Organize for Design: How can we plan and enact practices of collaboration that center care, dignity, equity?, (4) Evaluate and Iterate: How will we understand the impact of our designs? How can we improve upon both our processes and products?, (5) Sustain: How can we identify and build the structures necessary to sustain our designs? These categories, and the resources within them, are not designed to be linear, prescriptive, or comprehensive. They are intended as a starting place to ignite curiosity, reflection, conversation, and collaboration. We invite you to explore these participatory design tools and adapt them to fit your team and your context. These tools have emerged out of many collaborations and across many iterations. We see these as a living library and look forward to the ways in which the tools will grow and evolve. We welcome your feedback at crowninstitute@colorado.edu.
Authors
This project was supported by the Crown Institute. This toolkit was created and curated by a team of researchers and practitioners representing the fields of education, psychology, and sociology. The resources in this toolkit have been developed in the context of deep partnerships with many youth and community collaborators, by whom this project was made possible and for whom we have deep gratitude.