Participatory Pattern Workshops

This is the overarching pattern that describes the participatory pattern workshops. For the latest version of this pattern please see the Planet xWiki site.

PPWs

Participatory Pattern Workshops

Summary

The Participatory Methodology for Practical Design Patterns is a process by which communities of practitioners can collaboratively reflect on the challenges they face and the methods for addressing them. The outcome of the process is a set of case stories, design patterns and future scenarios situated in a particular domain of practice.

It was developed by the Learning Patterns project and refined by the Planet (Pattern Language Network) project.

Problem

The last decade has witnessed a growing acknowledgment of the design pattern paradigm for research and practice in the learning sciences (e.g., Bergin, 2000; Goodyear et al, 2004; Brouns et al. 2005; Retalis et al, 2006). This paradigm signals a potential to address the challenges of the design divide in technology-enhanced learning (Winters and Mor, 2008). Yet despite the apparent promise of this movement, it has so far had limited impact on educational research and practice. In part, this is due to the unfamiliar discourse that the design paradigm brings to the field education. In part, it might be attributed to two of the fundamental assumptions behind this paradigm, namely timelessness and expertise. In a domain dominated by accelerated change, both of these assumptions are disputed.

Timelessness refers to qualities of artefacts which have been refined over an extensive period of use. Expertise suggests that design knowledge has a focus of locus. Alexander’s seminal work (Alexander at al, 1977) was focused on the design of built environment. In this domain, there are certain problems, and associated solutions, which are rooted in fundamental characteristics of human existence, and have been refined over millennia. For example, the form and location of doors and windows. Architects’ expertise relies on tacit knowledge of these patterns. The agenda of the design patterns movement included an attempt to democratise the design of buildings, giving residents greater ownership over their living spaces.

We are concerned with advanced digital learning environments. In this domain the rate of change is such that new solutions are afforded and new problems emerge every day. No one person can keep apace of all changes, and so expertise becomes highly distributed: an early adopter of one technology may become an expert in its use, while falling behind on other fronts. The challenge is no more one of pushing design knowledge down from experts to laypeople. Instead, we have a much more complex problem of continuous sharing of design knowledge across networks.

In order to elicit powerful and contemporary design patterns from communities of educational practitioners, and make these patterns useful for broad audiences, we need a structured process of guided design-level conversation, leading participants from their personal experiences to coherent pattern languages.

Context

The Participatory Methodology for Practical Design Patterns is aimed at interdisciplinary communities of practitioners engaged in collaborative reflection on a common theme of their practice. These can be ad-hoc communities, e.g. participants in a workshop, but a sense of community is nonetheless a prerequisite, in the sense of a common commitment to an inquisitive process and a genuine attempt to establish a shared discourse. The methodology assumes a blended setting: at its heart is a series of workshops; co-located (on-site) meetings of 4-8 hours. In between these meetings, and to an extend within them, participants communicate and develop their ideas using an on-line collaborative authoring system.

Solution

The Participatory Methodology for Practical Design Patterns is based on two fundamental assumptions: we are all experts, and we are all designers. This methodology utilises narrative epistemology: practitioners are prompted to recount their experiences as case stories, and discuss these with their peers. The construction and discussion of these narratives are scaffolded by a set of tools and activities to extract transferable and verifiable elements of design knowledge in the form of design patterns.

This methodology defines a process by which individuals and groups elicit structured design knowledge from their experience through a series of open yet directed activities. In an ideal setting, this process would have the following phases (mandatory in bold):

  1. Sharing expertise through structured stories of problems in the target domain and their resolution.
  2. Scrutinizing and refinement of these stories by guided conversation with peers.
  3. Comparative analysis with respect to similar cases.
  4. Extraction of common features across similar cases, in terms of problem, context and method of solution.
  5. Grouping triplets of context, problem and solution as proto-patterns.
  6. Articulation of problem description by collaborative mapping of forces.
  7. Collaborative composition of a map of key concepts emerging from the cases and the analysis.
  8. Articulation of alpha-state design patterns based on the proto-patterns using the vocabulary derived from the concept mapping.
  9. Developing these patterns to beta-state, by providing support, in the form of triangulating cases and theoretical rationale.
  10. Introduction of novel problems, in the form of future scenarios.
  11. Validating the patterns and demonstrating their use by applying them to the scenarios.

This process is realised by a series of collaborative reflection workshops, typically:

Ideally this would be a series of 3-4 full-day workshops, with 1-2 months in between. However, this process can be condensed as circumstances dictate. Needless to say, expectations should be adjusted to match the allocated resources.