Dataset for "Participatory Design in Refugee Camps: Comparison of Different Methods and Visualisation Tools"

Shelters for the displaced can suffer from socio-cultural incompatibility and significant levels of occupant dissatisfaction. Participatory Design (PD) is known to help reduce such issues. This is the first study to investigate the effectiveness of different PD methods at engaging and capturing users’ needs for shelter design in refugee camps. It also aimed to identify which visualisation tools are best at: engaging participants; communicating designs (e.g. concept, size and materials); and facilitating proposing modifications. This is a particularly large study with 16 workshops and 161 participants. Two PD methods were deployed: (i) Design-your-own (where refugees proposed their ideal shelter); (ii) Adapt-a-design (where refugees evaluated and modified pre-existing shelter designs). The shelters in (ii) were presented using three visualisation tools: computer models, physical prototypes and virtual reality. This dataset includes demographic information of the participants of the workshops, and the participant evaluations of the three visualisation tools tested in the Adapt-a-design workshops.