Re-Envisioning a Participatory Design Workshop

A Case Study on Paper Prototyping of Smart Footwear
Sheng-Hung Lee-02_POST
A Case Study on Paper Prototyping of Smart Footwear
Sheng-Hung Lee, Ziyuan Zhu, Chaiwoo Lee, Maria C. Yang, Joseph F. Coughlin
MIT Integrated Design & Management, MIT AgeLab, MIT School of Architecture & Planning, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT Ideation Labratory

Re-Envisioning a Participatory Design Workshop

A Case Study on Paper Prototyping of Smart Footwear
Sheng-Hung Lee-02_POST

During the pandemic, we leveraged resources from academia and industry to explore new and creative ways to conduct hybrid participatory workshops emphasizing product and service prototyping during the Human-Centered Design (HCD) process. In this paper, we define a “hybrid” workshop as one in which some participants are physically co-located while others join remotely. A descriptive case study is presented that examines how a three-hour hybrid participatory workshop might function as a format for  teaching HCD by testing with 60 people. We created a series of educational toolkits: one interactive workbook and five tutorials on a website to show workshop participants how to prototype indoor footwear concepts out of paper and develop a service  model for three different personas while also enabling them to have more transparent and interactive communication. The goal of the research is to identify and explore the design opportunities by conducting a hybrid participatory workshop.

Year: 2022