Employing Participatory Design to Establish a Networked Improvement Community

• In Event: Centering Equity and Practice Considerations in Improvement Scholarship

Abstract

COVID-19 created unique constraints for research partnerships including NICs, as teams worked to adjust research endeavors under particularly strenuous conditions. To understand our own initial experience of forming a NIC at the height of the pandemic, we work from foundational past research on initiating NICs and apply it to analyze year one of our efforts. We analyze the ways in which some of the key obstacles and barriers we faced as researchers revealed affordances that add additional experiences and nuance to the framework for the initiation of a NIC. We advance the claim that key participatory design moves like enacting flexibility, slowing down our timeline, and meeting with partners 1:1 to initiate the NIC humanized the experience for partners.

Authors

• Erica Jeanne Van Steenis, University of California - Irvine

• Lora Cawelti, University of California - Irvine

• June Ahn, University of California, Irvine

• Verenisse Ponce Soria, University of California - Irvine