A participatory design approach to work-study-life balance
We explored how university students balance work, study, and personal life, using participatory design (PD) methods. Through workshops and prototyping, we co-created concepts with students and stakeholders to envision supportive tools and systems.
Keyword: participatory design, workshops, co-creation
My role
Workshop facilitator and designer
Tools
Figma and workshop materials
Methodology
Participatory design
Challenge
Many students face the considerable challenge of juggling academic duties alongside work obligations. Additionally, engaging with this target group presented several challenges, primarily concerning participant recruitment for workshops (due to the target group’s busy nature) and specifying the use context.
Goal
This study aims to delve into how students perceive their own management of balancing work, study, and life, as well as to involve them in imagining potential artefact for improving this balance. A participatory design approach, which actively involves the target users in the design process, offers a promising pathway to create a more effective participant-engineered artifact.
The process
Our design process can be described as having a “fuzzy front end”. This is due to the unclear nature of the design process. At this pre-design stage, we cannot yet see the contours of the future that the artefact will shape. Therefore, a wide exploration of the future users, the use context(s), and technological opportunities is necessary.
Our exploration of future users was initially limited to students. As the project began to take shape, it became clear that further involvement of the university administration, the faculty, and external firms was necessary.
We conducted five design activities:
future workshop combined with a graffiti wall,
prototyping workshop aimed at generating and exploring ideas,
a prototyping workshop focused on evaluating and deciding on concepts,
an evaluation session with a peripheral user, and
an enactment session with the prototype in context.
Design activities & workshops
The future workshop, paired with a graffiti wall, let the participants articulate their present conditions, challenges, aspirations, or ideal scenarios, and suggest ways to realize these aspirations. This provided us with an initial insight into the participants’ needs. The participants’ values that emerged during this workshop evolved into guiding principles for the entire co-creation and co-design process. By treating values as “the engine that drives our design efforts, ” we engaged in dialogue with participants and deliberately outlined the values that emerged after each workshop
Values
In our fragmented participatory process, we chose to focus on values. Using values as a guide for selecting design activities and shaping participant interactions helped us weave the participants’ fragmented contributions into a cohesive whole.
After each workshop, we reflected on the values that were important to the participants. As they selected or refined design ideas, certain values were prioritized over others. The pink cloud illustrates how the scope of values became narrower.
The chosen design idea
The prototype predominantly favored by participants involved enhancing the University of Oslo’s website to allow students to collaborate on small-scale projects with companies, earning academic credits, practical experience, and a modest stipend. The concept allows students to select a project related to their coursework and apply to the appropriate company to start an internship. Participants emphasized that this approach could broaden students' professional networks, highlight their abilities to prospective employers, ease the transition into relevant employment, and lessen reliance on unrelated part-time jobs, leading to a new, well-defined demand for work experience. This initiative aligns with the participants’ values.
Reflections & takeaways
A significant part of being a designer in a participatory design project is being aware of one’s role. For me, this participatory design project has been an exercise in being a “thoughtful designer”. I had to figure out how to make the design process inclusive and collaborative, which required me to apply both critical thinking and communication skills. I reflected on how we could best accommodate the participants to give them a voice, a say, and the ability to shape the design process. This involved creating a comfortable environment and allowing for various forms of expression (verbal, written, drawing, etc.). I also had to recognize that understanding the design situation goes hand in hand with the development of design proposals and embrace the experimental and exploratory nature of participatory design.