Letting Go: Working with the Rhythm of Participants

The focus of this study is a community of families separated by prison. Some parts of this community do not engage with the support offered to it, regardless of delivery mechanism. In this study, we used a participatory design approach to community informatics to explore why some do not engage with the support offered and the potential for service design to increase engagement. This is a community where on-line service delivery is a method used to deliver information and support and so taking a community informatics lens helps to inform both on and off-line service design. This paper explores the use of four participatory design principles selected to improve the extent and quality of participation: ceding control, segmentation, situation and envisioning control. In this first phase of the study we discovered how the principle of feedback between segmented participant groups helps to develop an understanding of the service design needs for the whole community and is a potential technique for community informatics and service design in general to improve the quality of input to community service design.