Audience as co-designer: participatory designed posters for flood awareness and preparedness

This paper innovatively employs the methodology of participatory design as a visual design process to design for flood awareness. It is that traditional methods of designing print materials utilized a one-way method of communication (O’Neill’s, 2004). Most of the time, print materials for disaster awareness and preparedness are created at the national or regional levels, which often fail to effectively translate scholarly information into actionable preparedness measures and are distributed towards audiences with homogeneous characteristics. This reduces the usefulness of the materials in creating awareness and preparedness among the intended audiences. This study highlights the importance of the audience as co-designers in the creation of posters for flood awareness and preparedness, where the audience is the active participant in the design process and decision-making process to ensure that the materials are relevant and culturally resonant. Using participatory design, the researchers conducted a three-part workshop to create posters for flood awareness and preparedness. A key component is the collection of the first-hand flood experiences/narratives that influenced the design and production of the posters. The audience was heavily involved in the process, which makes them the owners of the outputs. The results, when viewed through the lens of participatory communication, showed that participatory design made the audience co-creators in both the design and the decision-making processes, thus making the solutions more acceptable and resonate with affected communities.