Mapping user participation/
involvement/
engagement
in design

This study aims to present results of a systematic mapping study (SMS) on participatory, collective, collaborative design approaches, tools and methods. Considering the extensive nature of this investigation, this SMS conducted to map the related research landscape, which will offer a background and a framework for a further systematic literature review. From this perspective, this mapping study identifies (1) the design concepts related to user participation/involvement/engagement; (2) the landscapes of design: most dominant contexts and areas of study; (3) the diversity and conceptualization of users defined in these studies; (4) insights about methods and tools for user participation/involvement/engagement in design processes.

Articles selection process showed that keywords such as participatory design and co-design seem more relevant in terms of user participation, involvement and engagement in design . Worth mentioning, we observed that in excluded articles these keywords are also used in relation to usability, human factors, ergonomics research and testing (this was also the case with user-centered design and human-centered design concepts), illustrating the wide range of fields those keywords could be used in, as well as the wide range of interpretations one could have of those keywords. Analysis also revealed that user-centered design and human-centered design concepts are pointing out involving user knowledge in the process; however, they don’t always require active involvement of the users in the design processes. These approaches may thus differ in their meaning, covering a variety of postures from “keeping users in mind during the design process”, to “user research” as well as “participatory processes”. Co-creation is also used to define co-creation of knowledge in some (excluded) articles for research purposes as well as in marketing contexts in terms of value co-creation. Collaborative design refers mostly to expert-designer collaboration in excluded articles, i.e. without active involvement of end-users in the design processes. On the other hand, other selected articles revealed that collaborative design concept is also used to define user, designer, stakeholder collaboration and involvement in design processes. All of these keywords are also used in some excluded articles to refer to “research design” and participation of “research subjects” to research and knowledge creation processes (i.e. end-users or affected groups considered as active agents of the scientific research process). It can therefore be observed that within current scientific discourses, these terms are sometimes used in an interchangeable manner, and sometimes to define very different roles and relations between actors in design processes.

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