Participatory Design Process
1. Organizing
Meet with students, teachers,
custodian, neighbors
Create your design team
Decide what you need to know
Learn what you can and can't
do
Plan your budget and timeline
Train adults, teenagers, and
kids
Select your site, project, or
theme
2. Fact finding
Study your site (perimeter,
sun/shade, soil)
Find or make maps and a base
model of your site
Study people near your site
and people who will use it
Study people's current use
and desires for the design
Learn about neighborhood and
citywide resources
3. Generating design ideas
Make drawings and lists of
design ideas
Make moveable model pieces of
design ideas
Generate design ideas on the
model
4. Creating a design
Create design ideas on the
model
Negotiate over designs
Create designs the team
agrees to and present
them to the community and owner of the land
5. Building the new design
Plan a construction timeline
Plan community construction
and professional construction
Create what your team has designed
& create programs in it