Participate: Designing with User-Generated Content

by Helen Armstrong, Zvezdana Stojmirovic, Ellen Lupton (Foreword)

Creativity is no longer the sole territory of the designer and other creative professionals. Amateurs are drawn to websites such as Flickr, Threadless, WordPress, YouTube, Etsy, and Lulu, approaching design with the expectation that they will fill in the content. Never has user-driven design been easier for the public to generate and distribute. How will such a fundamental shift toward bottom-up creation affect the design industry? Designing for Participatory Culture considers historical and contemporary models of making that provide ideas for harnessing user-generated content through participatory design. The authors discuss how designers can lead the new breed of widely distributed amateur creatives rather than be overrun by them. DPC challenges designers to transform audiences into users, and completed layouts into open-ended systems. The book opens with an introductory essay entitled 'Ceding Control,' which explores the general concept of participatory culture and the resulting emergence of systems-oriented models of co-creation. Four chapters Modularity, Flexibility, Community, and Technology explore the various approaches to participatory design through critical essays, case studies, and interviews with leading designers in the field.

Genres: Design

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 19, 2011

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Helen Armstrong, a Professor of Graphic Design at North Carolina State University, focuses her research on accessible design, digital rights, and machine learning. Armstrong authored Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field, Digital Design Theory: Readings from the Field and coauthored Participate: Designing with User-Generated Content. She is a past member of the AIGA National Board of Directors, the editorial board of Design and Culture, and a former co-chair of the AIGA Design Educators Community. Armstrong is the proud mom of a kid with disabilities and a fierce advocate for designing inclusive, intelligent, interfaces and experiences.

Currently, Armstrong is combining her knowledge of participatory practice with computational thinking to explore the potential of intelligent interfaces (i.e. machine learning) to address the needs of individuals with disabilities.

Reviews

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not stop turning the pages on this book. The writing guides you through maker and participatory culture through explanatory yet thought provoking essays. The essays are then paired with case studies that allow you to explore fine art, interactive design and DIY participatory investigations. This book has been by my side for the past two weeks in all of my meetings at my open source software design job. As our design culture progresses to become more participatory and collaborative, I suspect (and it is my not so secret hope) that the practices and techniques described in this book will become innate for individuals engaging in design.

[Yokusun Basi]

Participate: Designing with User-Generated Content by Helen Armstrong (2011)

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. I had highish hopes for the usefulness/intrestingness in a fine arts context of this book (several of the people interviewed in the book are also fine artists, and their art is discussed), but it seemed more of a very surface treatment of the material. And the figure numbers were all wrong! This kept bothering me.

[Philippe Heckly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear overlook on what interactivity is going, what it is doing and how it is adding value by keeping us interested.