Scaffolding design sessions with teenagers: the PDA approach

Participatory design (PD) methods generally provide little guidance/reporting on how the tasks are introduced to participants and how participants are supported in carrying them out. This area, of understanding how a participant is guided through a design task, is particularly important for child and teenage participants who may be unwilling, for a range of reasons, to admit they do not understand a task and ask for help. This paper introduces an approach (called Primed Design Activity or PDA) used to help prime participants in a design session, the key aim of the work was to scaffold the introduction and completion of a PD task without biasing the outcome. The study reported in this paper showed that the approach was successful in assisting participants in completing a design task in a short amount of time and capturing useful outputs.