Participatory Design and Testing of Food Handling and Entrepreneurship Guidebook for Bukidnon Women

Abstract

Designing a material with no regard to user’s needs become useless in the long run. State universities are mandated to do extension work as one of its functions. Usually, extension materials are developed by extension workers without the participation of its intended users. These materials then do not serve its purpose. Thus, this study on participatory design and testing of a guidebook with the Bukidnon women discovered how a learning material can be carried out from an extension project facilitated by a state university. Following the telling-making-enacting framework, it allowed the participants to empathize with the problems encountered in understanding the message content and design produced by a state university, and defined the problem in a user-centered way. It proceeded to ideating and creating a prototype of its own desired material with the significant role of the designer and non-designers’ ideas combined. Exploring participatory design and testing for an improved extension material designed by an intended community yielded positive results when tested by the prospect end-users. Results also showed a unified acceptability, strong agreement on comprehensibility with clear messages in the use of images and texts, provided clear instruction due to the local dialect used, Binukid. Suffice to say that the jointly designed guidebook posed high interest for the next endusers being viewed as an economic and empowering tool in their lives. Hence, participatory design and testing as a method allowed the participants to arrive at agreements on their desired parameters in developing the material. Results as well led to the development of a communication framework for extension workers whose outputs include content and design review report, extension material design plan, extension material, pretesting results, and copyrighted material.