Segmentation of users in PD for healthcare

Participatory Design (PD) attracts great attention from designers working within healthcare, but also faces important challenges. In this paper we describe how the high complexity and heterogeneity in healthcare creates conceptual and pragmatic barriers for user participation. We study the notion of 'users' in traditional PD and argue that PD can benefit from exploring ways to segment users that goes beyond the existing approaches. We put forth the question 'can users in PD be involved in any other meaningful way, than as one group of representatives for the multiplicity of user needs?', and look to two other traditions, marketing and innovation studies, to explore how the understanding of segmentation in these traditions can contribute to the development of guidelines for user segmentation in PD. Guidelines not solely based on representativeness, but on skills, personal preferences and/or perceptions.