Participative Design Using Soft Systems Methodology

Participative design is an effective tool for designing organizational systems where conflicting and diverse goals of users and clients from different organizations must be reconciled. This paper presents a methodology for participative design based on Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). A brief overview of SSM is first presented. The design methodology is then presented within the SSM framework. The design methodology prescribes a set of activities to accomplish participative design, and uses two design tools from the manufacturing and process engineering fields Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and the IDEF0 functional modeling method. Experiences using the design methodology are also presented.