What is Participatory Design (User Participation in Design)

Data collection is vital for every design process in order to define the design parameters that will guide the rest of the process. In this chapter data collection procedure and evaluation methods used for the project Re-Coding Homes is discussed by focusing on field research and survey studies. Survey studies are mainly based on semi-structured interviews and spatial mapping methods. The interview was structured to collect data about the family structures, daily routines, social relations, and comparisons between the current and previous living environments. After completing the survey, answers given to the questions were transferred into digital data. During the systematization of the results, the most important problem was to process the complex data in order to support the design model. In this sense, a reporting software was designed to evaluate the data group. The parameters extracted by means of the reporting software became the main input for the expert system.