A Participatory Design Approach with Visually Impaired People for the Design of an Art Exhibition

This article describes the participatory design (PD) approach adopted in systematically involving visually impaired people in the design of an art exhibition adapted to their needs. This exhibition will be the outcome of a publicly-funded research project aimed at making visual art accessible to everyone: specifically (but not exclusively) to visually impaired people, in an objective of social inclusion. This article presents the research done to elicit, capture, and analyse the needs of visually impaired people who are the active actors of this research. The aim of the article is to trigger discussion about both the necessity and difficulty of elaborating relevant techniques in this empirical and open-ended approach, and what is meant by participation in this particular setting.