Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
27 results found in Participatory Design.
- Bidirectional Learning
- A principle in community-based and participatory design research in which knowledge flows in both directions between researchers/designers and community members, rather than researchers extracting dat…
- Bodystorming (Embodied Brainstorming)
- A participatory design method where participants physically act out scenarios, interactions, or use cases using their bodies rather than paper prototypes or verbal descriptions. In accessibility resea…
- Boundary Object
- A concept introduced by Star and Griesemer (1989) for artefacts, documents, or concepts that are flexible enough to be used across different communities of practice while retaining a recognisable iden…
- Citizen Science (Community Science, Participatory Science)
- Citizen science is a research approach that engages non-expert members of the public in collecting, processing, or analyzing scientific data, often through purpose-built interactive tools and platform…
- Co-design (Co-creation, Cooperative Design)
- A design methodology where end users actively participate as partners throughout the design process, contributing their expertise and lived experience to shape solutions. In co-design, researchers and…
- Design Informant (Informant Design)
- A participatory design role in which users contribute to the design process by providing input, preferences, and feedback, but the researcher retains responsibility for interpreting this data and maki…
- Disability-Led Design (Disability-Led)
- A design practice in which people with disabilities are not consultants, test subjects, or "users" but the authors, directors, and decision-makers shaping the work. Disability-led projects invert the …
- Embodied Sketching
- Embodied sketching is a participatory design method in which participants and designers physically act out interaction ideas with their bodies, props, and the surrounding space rather than only sketch…
- Ethic of Care (Care Ethics, Feminist Ethics of Care)
- A moral and methodological framework, rooted in feminist philosophy, that centers relationships, responsibility, and responsiveness to the needs of others rather than abstract principles or transactio…
- Ethnographic Study (Ethnography, Ethnographic Research)
- A qualitative research methodology originating in anthropology that involves prolonged, immersive observation of people in their natural environments to understand their behaviours, practices, and soc…
- Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD)
- A participatory methodology originally developed in UK health services research that treats people's lived experience - their 'emotional touch-points' of confusion, frustration, or insight - as the co…
- Future Workshop
- A participatory research method developed by Jungk and Mullert in 1987 that supports collective reflection and idea generation about possible futures. A Future Workshop typically unfolds in phases: cr…
- Hackability
- A methodology and design philosophy for encouraging DIY assistive technology development in which disabled people, allies, and professionals collaboratively hack, adapt, and remix existing objects int…
- Leadership of the Most Affected
- A core principle of disability-justice organising that positions people most directly affected by a problem — those with the most at stake and the most lived expertise — as the leaders of work aimed a…
- Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP)
- A concept from Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's situated-learning theory describing how newcomers join a community of practice by first participating in peripheral, lower-stakes activities and gradually…
- Non-Participation
- In Wenger's Communities of Practice framework, the active (rather than merely absent) relationships people have with a community they do not fully join. Wenger identifies four forms: compromise (stepp…
- Online Focus Group (Virtual Focus Group, Remote Focus Group)
- A qualitative research method in which a group of participants discusses a topic through an online platform rather than meeting in person. Online focus groups are particularly valuable for accessibili…
- PICTIVE (Plastic Interface for Collaborative Technology Initiatives through Video Exploration)
- PICTIVE is a participatory paper-prototyping technique introduced by Michael Muller at CHI 1991, in which end users and designers jointly build low-fidelity interface prototypes using pre-cut paper UI…
- Participatory Captioning
- A framework proposed by Nguyen et al. (2026) that characterises social media video captioning as a collaborative, community-sustained infrastructure co-produced by viewers, creators, and platforms — r…
- Participatory Design (Co-Design, Cooperative Design, PD)
- A design methodology that actively involves end users as partners in the design process rather than passive subjects of user testing. In accessibility contexts, participatory design is particularly im…