PADRE: A Method for Participatory Action Design Research

Action Design Research (ADR) is a Design Research (DR) method that enriches the Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm, by providing stages and principles for designing artifacts and allowing for their emergence in an organizational context. The method has been used and elaborated by scholars, extending the mode of the method and its stages, incorporating and adopting knowledge from related approaches such as Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Participatory Design (PD). In this paper, we have adopted principles and philosophy from PAR and PD to extend and elaborate the ADR method, by providing a front-end of Action Research (AR) that emphasizes learning through incremental iteration. We will introduce our elaborated method as Participatory Action Design Research (PADRE) and demonstrate how we have used it in our own research. We argue that the ADR method can benefit from incorporating learning within and across each and every stage iteratively. We also argue that learning can be used as a learning nexus, which informs and gets accumulated for formalization of learning that can be re-used within different cycles of ADR. Hence, we introduce PADRE and provide a model that consists of a set of key-components, which extends and elaborates the ADR method.