Challenges of participatory design for social innovation a case study in aging society

The purpose of the paper is to further our understanding of conditions for participatory design (PD). We base our reflections on an ongoing project to develop new ICT concepts for social innovation to mitigate consequences of the aging society as faced by a Japanese city. MUST was chosen since it is a PD method that has been successfully applied in commercial contexts in the US and in Scandinavia. However, we found that social innovation is a complex new territory for PD, both as to project management issues and in terms of conditions for applying tools and techniques for participatory analysis and design. Especially, we found that identifying and adequately engaging stakeholders to be problematic. The diverse set of user groups, potential customers, and IT-developers could not all be defined at the start. This calls for a different type of iteration than the MUST method suggests. Further, the method presumes the involved stakeholders to be able to spend more time in the project than the stakeholders in this project could commit to.