Adoção de técnicas de design participativo por meio de CSCW: suporte à colaboração distribuída

Abstract

Participatory Design (PD) originated in Scandinavia in the mid-1970s, in a period that workers, through labor unions, were requesting more empowerment in the decision-making process related to adoption of technology in the workplace. PD became a methodology that addresses involvement of designers and non-designers working together in design activities of a project through participatory practices. Those PD’s practices are commonly explored with co-located participants, using PD’s techniques to support and mediate interaction across participants. Justified by absence of Distributed Participatory Design’s practices (DPD), which stakeholders are located in different geographic spaces, this master’s thesis presents the benefits, limitations and adaptations necessary to adopt PD’s techniques in DPD’s practices through collaborative systems. The BrainDraw technique was chosen to be investigated in the scope of this study and to help finding answers for this research questions. The results of this research involve an analogy between the phases of the PD methodology defined by Spinuzzi and PD practices in the software development life cycle by Muller, Hallewell and Dayton, that helps researchers and developers to decide about which technique of PD is more suitable to be used in distributed contexts. It also presents three participatory workshops for requirements analysis of a collaborative system called DEA System (Participatory Design in Action) to adopt practices of BrainDraw in a distributed context. The development and empirical and participatory evaluation of DEA System were conducted with the purpose of seeking answers to the objective of this research. Based on this research’s results, we present benefits, differences and necessary adaptations identified to conduct BrainDraw practices in distributed contexts through collaborative systems. Finally, we present the contributions of this research to Computer Science area and to society, and also some discussions about its limitations and future works.