Participatory Design for sustainable social innovation in developing countries: Design experiments towards a model to deploy interventions with marginalised youth

An increasing number of practitioners are engaging in the consideration of Participatory Design (PD) as a strategic modus operandi to attain socially progressive ends among marginalised communities in developing countries. However, the structures, methods and objectives of this type of work constitute an ongoing debate. A scattered body of resources in this area tend to focus on either theory (such as journal papers) or practice (such as design toolkits). To fill this gap, this research develops a model of practice that links these two dimensions through a collection of elements drawn upon contemporary approaches to design and development. The model considers three layers of ethos, methods and outputs to guide the design and undertaking of social-entrepreneurially oriented PD interventions with a focus on problem identification. Two case studies are undertaken with communities of marginalised youth in South Africa to evaluate the model and its inherent flexibility respectively. The evaluation found that the model enabled the researcher to build capacity and empower participants to gain leadership and ownership over the intervention, ultimately developing their sense of activism and aspiration for change. On this basis, a final version of the model is put forward to help prepare and guide design practitioners to deploy PD interventions with marginalised youth in developing countries for responsible and sustainable social innovation. In addition, the research reflects on the various roles that design practitioners take on while deploying the intervention and on the use of a cross-paradigm to undertake the type of design research approached in this thesis.