Participatory Design Tools: Leveraging Materiality and Familiarity to Adapt Unconventional Materials into Design Tools

As participatory design approaches proliferate into mainstream industry practice, it becomes important for designers to consider how design tools, methods and practices can be made more accessible for non-designers - fostering participatory mindsets. We explore how materiality and familiarity of design tools impact participation, by investigating an off-the-shelf, familiar material - the Rubik's Cube, for application possibilities as an unconventional design tool. We report on a series of workshops with design practitioners and educators, that find disassociating design methods from traditional materials, opens new possibilities for methodological innovations, while revealing promising avenues to improve participation. We categorise findings into three themes: material properties, staging considerations, and emergent practices. This is supplemented by two Illustrative examples of emergent applications of using Rubik's Cubes to augment (1) de Bono's random input method; and (2) creating dynamic persona states. The emergent applications present new material possibilities enabling design methods to innovate and evolve.