The participatory workshop is a new concept of design in which developers, end users, and researchers work together to design a product or service. This approach is still in its experimental stage as applied to studying jobs in the construction industry. In the current study, a participatory workshop was conducted to generate ideas for an improved Personal Fall Arrest System (PFAS) design and another workshop was held to generate ideas on fall protection training. In addition to generating ideas about PFAS design and fall protection training, the data collected through the workshop process was used to create three personas that served, at the end of the project, as vehicles for summarizing the research results. The workshop method is more commonly used by designers, but can provide useful information that can complement data from surveys or laboratory investigations conducted by human factors professionals and others interested in user-centered design.
A Synchronous Collaboration Server for the Construction Industry - The End Users’ Experience in the Collaborator Project