Participatory Pathways: Proposing a Method for Documenting Decisions in Participatory Design

This paper introduces Participatory Pathways, a method for documenting and reflecting on participation-related decisions in PD. While individual participatory activities are often well captured, the underlying decision-making processes, such as who is involved, when, and with what role, often remain implicit. Building on the Ethics Pathways approach by Cha et al. (2024), this method adapts a visual and narrative-based format to support critical reflection on the evolving logic of participation across a project. We discuss key adaptation challenges for PD contexts, such as defining meaningful participatory incidents and addressing the methodological implications of working with multiple, diverse perspectives. The paper proposes Participatory Pathways as a conceptual contribution to the PD community and invites further exploration, refinement, and application of the method in future research and practice, including its integration into participatory workflows and its evaluation in real-world settings.