Participative Design Using Soft Systems Methodology

Adrien Presley, Joseph Sarkis, Don Liles, William Barnett

Association for Information Systems Conference Proceedings, Baltimore, MD, 1998. pp. 804-806.

Participative design is an effective tool for designing organizational systems where conflicting and diverse goals of users and clients from different organizations must be reconciled. This paper presents a methodology for participative design based on Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). A brief overview of SSM is first presented. The design methodology is then presented within the SSM framework. The design methodology prescribes a set of activities to accomplish participative design, and uses two design tools from the manufacturing and process engineering fields - Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and the IDEF0 functional modeling method. Experiences using the design methodology are also presented.

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