Mohammed Baaoum and Kristen Davis

Many humanitarian engineering projects have failed over the years because they did not properly involve community members or take into account the cultural, social, historical, and political realities of the communities where projects were undertaken (Riley, 2008). The use of participatory design (PD) is often advocated to resolve this issue (e.g., Arce, 2004; Sharma et al., 2008). It is still not clear, however, what it means to use PD in humanitarian engineering and how PD methods differ from other user design approaches, thereby allowing practitioners to label their work “participatory design” without being accountable to established, grounded precedent (Spinuzzi, 2005). The goal of this paper is therefore to explore the meaning, promises, and challenges of using PD in humanitarian engineering projects.