Participatory Design Framework

Version 2.0 – 2026 UCL Trellis Symposium

As part of the 2026 Trellis Symposium hosted by UCL East, John and Caroline have updated the Participatory Design Framework which you can download below.

The revised version has the project timeline flowing from left to right, whilst up the side are increasing possible levels of community participation.

To test it out for yourself, why not try following these steps:

1. Choose a project you are working on, or have worked on. Where the community can be significantly impacted by your work?
2. Think about how the project starts. Who decided to make this happen? What was their intent? How involved were the community?
3. During the project, choose three main activities or events that will happen in order to progress towards to desired outcome. Which level does each step sit at in terms of community participation?
4. Now, what happens at the end of the project? How will the outcomes be achieved, by who, and what moment draws it to a close?
5. Finally, go back through each stage of the project. Where can you see opportunities for communities to become (or have been) more involved in each of them?

Here’s an example, based on a research process involving some interviews. It has more than the five steps, but it gives you a sense of the sorts of steps you could highlight as opportunities for more participative work with communities.

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Origin

In 2023-24, we were working closely with Caroline Ward of Wellcome Trust on the Community Strategy for the Climate and Health mission. This framework emerged as a useful way of thinking about how to centre the communities whose health was most affected.

It was based in an initial round of deep literature research across the participatory space by Caroline, from which we then created a version specific to Wellcome Trust’s activities in supporting communities through the research funding structure.

This version below is the generalised version, which I have subsequently used in teach at the Royal College of Art and IED Barcelona.

The basic approach is fairly simple. For any project you are working on where community participation is important, think of it in three phases; Starting, Working, and Showing. That forms the Y axis down the side.

Now thinking about how involved the community you want to work with will be at each stage. Draw this initial plan up through the three phases, with each phase located according to how participative it is at the moment.

Then think about how you can make each stage as participative as possible, and draw an arrow out to this new location for each of the three phases.

What can happen, by seeing a project in this way, is you can spot ways of making projects more participative earlier on (in the Starting phase), in order to build in more trust and capabilities to forefront communities through the latter phases (Working and Showing).

If you have any questions or builds, we’d love to hear from you.