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5 publications listed under Participatory Design

Recess and After-Hours Behavior Patterns Associated With Community Schoolyard Transformations

2026 / Children, Participatory Design, School

Background Spending time in nature and physical activity are both linked to better health outcomes for children. School environments provide the potential for multiple interventions to promote healthy behaviors. Transforming these existing public spaces to serve broader activity functions provides opportunities to support healthy child development and to increase nature access for local communities. Methods Our quasi-experimental design capitalized on a community-engaged schoolyard redesign and redevelopment project completed at two elementary schools in Tacoma, Washington, USA, led by the Trust for Public Land. Renovations included painting paved surfaces, installation of new play structures, adding walking paths and log seating areas, and planting trees. We used a validated momentary time sampling observational tool, the System for Observing Outdoor Play Environments in Neighborhood schools (SOOPEN), before and after for two schools undergoing the transformation and a control school. Moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and within-group behaviors in the schoolyard were observed. We used a difference-in-difference approach to estimate the effect of the schoolyard renovation on behavior during recess, and on community use of the schoolyard outside of school hours. Results The schoolyard transformation was associated with a 1.51-times greater increase (95% CI: 0.95, 2.40) in MVPA during recess at intervention schools compared to the control school, although this association was only statistically significant among groups of boys. After renovation, MVPA was highest in grassy areas at one school (69%), but highest in paved zones with newly painted markings at the other (75%). Renovations were not associated with changes in the prevalence of prosocial behavior during recess, which was high at baseline. The schoolyard transformation was also associated with increased community use outside of school hours, especially for groups of children (5.8-times [95% CI: 1.4, 23.8] greater increase in use over time at renovation schools compared to the control school). Conclusions Schoolyard transformations have the potential to increase schoolyard use and physical activity both during and outside of school hours, if campuses are open to community use. Additional rigorous research can inform future projects to support the health of school-age children and address inequities in distribution of community greenspaces.

Planning for Your CANOE (Circumspect Awareness and Navigation of Outcomes and Expectations) Journey in Community-Engaged Research With Indigenous Communities

2025 / Indigenous communities, Participatory Design

Community engagement has long been recognised as necessary for working with Indigenous communities. Although many researchers are excited to engage with communities and many articles describe the process of community engagement in research, almost none have addressed the foundational question of whether researchers should engage with Indigenous communities for research. In this Viewpoint, we will discuss the Circumspect Awareness and Navigation of Outcomes and Expectations (CANOE) approach, which describes what should be considered before embarking on a community-engaged research journey with Indigenous communities. We build on existing literature regarding understanding the need to recognise positionality, practise reflexivity, assess personal strengths and weaknesses, and consider abilities and skills that can be offered or promised to Indigenous partners. Our goal is to provide principles of being reflexive, intentional, and careful before launching into research with Indigenous communities. Drawing from our combined decades of experience as Indigenous, community-engaged scientists leading national and international community projects, we draw from the extant literature and lessons learned in the field to provide a guiding CANOE approach for community-engaged research. This Viewpoint provides researchers interested in community-engaged projects with the information they need to consider before embarking on their research journey. We provide a set of CANOE self-assessment questions designed to evaluate a researcher’s preparedness, suitability to invest in a research partnership, and adaptability to navigate a research journey with Indigenous communities. Not only should relationships be properly developed and nurtured, but researchers need to fundamentally understand their ability to develop research partnerships that prioritise Indigenous cultural worldviews and protocols in research design, development, testing, and implementation.

Participatory Design for Community Schoolyards: Mixed Methods Reveal Positive Engagement Despite Measures Limitations

2024 / Children, Participatory Design, School

Extensive research demonstrates that parks are important for human health and well-being across the human life span. Research also reveals disparities in park distribution both across and within cities of the United States, with under-resourced communities often having fewer green spaces, and ones that are smaller and of lower quality. Outdoor spaces at public schools can be reimagined as community parks to welcome public use after-hours and on weekends. The Community Schoolyards initiative of The Trust for Public Land promotes engagement with school districts and park systems to expand park access in urban underserved communities. Our engaged team science approach used a natural experiment situation to evaluate multiple aspects of a schoolyard-to-park transformation program in Tacoma, Washington (USA), with a focus on civic intelligence. We combined community engagement with evaluation to understand how elementary school students responded to participatory design when generating ideas for their local schools’ schoolyard renovations. A pre–post, mixed-methods study (two intervention schools and one control school) was conducted despite COVID closures and remote teaching, requiring multiple study adaptations. Combined quantitative (student surveys) and qualitative (teacher interviews) methods were implemented to understand the impacts of a participatory design process for children. Quantitative results indicated little change from baseline, while qualitative results suggest substantial positive developmental outcomes. While additional research is needed, particularly in less extraordinary times than those presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, we found that an early design experience can introduce children to new ways of thinking about their school, their community, themselves, and the importance of parks.

Land as a Process of Reconciliation: Transforming Health Narratives Among Land-Based Healing Camp Facilitators

2023 / COVID, Health and well-being, Indigenous communities, Participatory Design

Colonialism has resulted in isolation, lack of services, and health disparities experienced by Indigenous peoples (IPs)1 which increased risk for COVID-19. Despite this, IPs have found ways to thrive. For example, they have implemented land-based healing (LBH) interventions2, 3, 4. Increasing cultural continuity through reconnecting to the land has broad implications for the health and wellbeing of IPs. As such, CIEDAR (CoVaRR-Net’s Indigenous Engagement, Development, and Research Pillar 7) partnered with Taché Waters Healing Society (TWHS) to achieve the following objectives. To co-develop a LBH camp grounded in culture to facilitate healing from the ongoing impacts of settler-colonialism, exacerbated by the pandemic. To evaluate the LBH camp pilot by asking the following question: How does being guided upon the land influence facilitators perspectives of health and wellbeing? The Indigenous Worldviews that informed the camp created a decolonizing space. This allowed camp facilitators to shift their narrative about health and wellbeing from one that was Westernized towards one that sees wellbeing as a holistic process. After this shift in understanding occurred, facilitators formed connections with others, themselves, and place, which facilitated wellbeing.

Designing for Human Values in an Urban Simulation System: Value Sensitive Design and Participatory Design

2004 / Participatory Design, Urban

UrbanSim is a large-scale simulation system that models the development of urban areas over periods of 20 or more years. Its purpose is to help citizens and local governments make more informed decisions about major transportation and land use issues, by projecting the long-term consequences of the different alternatives. Citizens often bring strongly held values to such decisions, for example regarding equity, sustainability, environmental protection, economic expansion, or property rights, and the decisions are often politically charged. To help shape the design of UrbanSim to better support the democratic process, as well as to be responsive to the values held by different stakeholders and the conflicts among them, we are using Value Sensitive Design, a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that seeks to account for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process. Participatory Design also has a good deal to say about these issues. Thus, in this paper, we first describe UrbanSim and Value Sensitive Design, and provide a snapshot of our ongoing work in this area. We then use the UrbanSim work as an example to bring out key commonalities and differences between Value Sensitive Design and Participatory Design, and to motivate some preliminary ideas about ways in which each methodology could evolve based on techniques and concepts from the other.