On Creating and Sustaining Alternatives: The case of Danish Telehealth

This week’s paper by Kyng, M. (2015) was about the initiative of creating a telemedicine system by mixing Participatory Design (PD) with modern software development techniques. Paper described the use case of Danish Telehealth system and the 4S initiative which aimed to develop a open source toolkit for healthcare software. The goal of the project was to “democratize technology” and to create engagement among patients and healthcare personnel. They saw this type of design path to be a better alternative for the ones that major commercial software development companies use.

Having worked in a software development company for five years I have a good knowledge of how the ecosystem works. Participatory Design in the other hand is a relatively new concept for me and you could imagine my surprise when the author wrote that that PD is a much better agile development method than SCRUM, which is the basis of modern software development. I would have liked a better explanation of why he thinks that.

PD’s main goal is to involve people in the development of ICT and allow them to have a saying how they think the ICT should be developed. In theory PD has the potential to produce better results in the end, but it creates a lot of different opinions how the software should look like and this can drastically increase the development time of the system. This was the case with the two projects using OpenTele, as they were behind schedule. Also we have to think about what are the personal motivations of all the stakeholders and are these beneficial for the system as a whole. I am all for the idea of open source government projects and open licences because it has a lot of benefits. It gives small players the chance to pitch in – pushing for better solutions and nourishing innovation (which some of the big corporations lack).

In conclusion I would say that the paper gives a good insight how participatory design can be applied to sustain democratic control in software development process. However, with the PD shifting from its original definition of “workplace democracy” to more abstract “democratization of technology”, the final design path might not be PD as there’s more to democracy and politics than PD – which was noted by the author.

The paper I chose for next week’s discussion is The Neighborhood Networks project: a case study of critical engagement and creative expression through participatory design.  I recently read another paper by DiSalvo, C. (2010) called Design, Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism and where the author debated over what constitutes democracy. I wanted to extend my reading and also the paper fits perfectly with the themes of Digital Civics.