The field of Participatory Design (PD) has greatly diversified and we see a broad spectrum of approaches and methodologies emerging. However, to foster its role in designing future interactive technologies, a discussion about accountability and rigour across this spectrum is needed. Rejecting the traditional, positivistic framework, we take inspiration from related fields such as Design Research and Action Research to develop interpretations of these concepts that are rooted in PD׳s own belief system. We argue that unlike in other fields, accountability and rigour are nuanced concepts that are delivered through debate, critique and reflection. A key prerequisite for having such debates is the availability of a language that allows designers, researchers and practitioners to construct solid arguments about the appropriateness of their stances, choices and judgements.

This paper presents the technology enabled feedback on domestic energy consumption that promote awareness and lead to energy savings. This explore an activity-centric view of energy consumption in shared spaces, such as offices. While a focus on changed consumption outcomes will ultimately be the key test of a good device, more systematic user experience and design studies, across a range of settings, might provide more confidence that the devices we're designing are both fit to task and will be acceptable as well as usable. The authors articulate a set of design concerns that frame and focus ongoing research into user experience and more effective feedback display designs.

By default, many discussions and specifications of electronic health records or integrated care records often conceptualize the record as a passive information repository. This article presents data from a case study of work in a medical unit in a major metropolitan hospital. It shows how the clinicians tailored, re-presented and augmented clinical information to support their own roles in the delivery of care for individual patients. This is referred to as the working record: a set of complexly interrelated clinician-centred documents that are locally evolved, maintained and used to support delivery of care in conjunction with the more patient-centred chart that will be stored in the medical records department on the patient’s discharge. Implications are drawn for how an integrated care record could support the local tailorability and flexibility that underpin this working record and hence underpin practice.