Towards a Methodology for the Participatory Design of Agent-Based Models (Early Innovation) Thanh-Quang Chu UMMISCO, UMI 209, IRD & IFI-MSI Bondy, France Hanoi, Vietnam thanh.quang@gmail.com Alain Boucher UMMISCO, UMI 209, IFI-MSI Hanoi, Vietnam alain.boucher@auf.org Alexis Drogoul UMMISCO, UMI 209, IRD & IFI-MSI Bondy, France Hanoi, Vietnam alexis.drogoul@gmail.com Jean-Daniel Zucker UMMISCO, UMI 209, UPMC Paris, France jdzucker@gmail.com ABSTRACT Developing models that effectively model human behavior and activities in social phenomena requires a tight collaboration between designers, experts and end-users. This paper presents an approach based on participatory design to find the most effective ways to succeed in this endeavor. Building up from a case study in emergency management, we identify three key design activities that have proven essential to be articulated so that users knowledge is elicited with ease and efficiency. The first is the design of the user-interface, the second the design of scenarios and the third the design of the experimental protocol. These activities pave the way for a first step towards a complete methodology. Keywords Participatory design, Agent-based simulation, Role-playing games, Emergency management. 1. INTRODUCTION The participatory design (known before as Cooperative Design) attempts to actively involve all stakeholders (e.g. designers, developers, experts, end-users, etc.) in the design process to help ensure that the product designed meets their needs and is usable. The methodological solution, called Cooperative Prototyping, proposed by Grønbæk [9,10,11,12], aims at involving users in design and evaluation of early prototypes of information systems. This approach proposes solutions to two problems: on one hand, how to motivate the users to “play the game” of being in a work situation with a preliminary prototype of a future computer application; on the other hand, the necessity to make users understand that the prototype they are playing with is changeable and far from being a complete application, which means they can make proposals [9]. By applying participatory design for social simulations, which aim at modeling and understanding social phenomena or resolution of society for a given problem, we have the participatory social simulations (PSSs). The stakeholders are involved in designing PSSs from the earliest stage [21] to validate and improve the modeled behavior in order to these systems are more realistic in simulating the resolution of society for that problem [2,3,7,8]. Figure 1. The interactive diagram of the design process for PSSs: this process consists in designing the simulation, conducting the experiments, organizing debriefing sessions and analyzing the result [2]. Our research presents the participatory design process of a complete PSS. In fact, the users are involved to play the role of agents in a simulation (based on a prototype model) and help these agents in making decisions in given situations. The sequence of work situations will allow the participants to navigate from one situation to another in order that they participate actively in games. Because, the PSSs make participants understand better the model and can take part in solving problem, so the modelers (i.e. designers) can build more realistic model and improve the efficiency of model in solving the problem base on the elicited individual/collective behavior of participants. This paper mainly addresses the question of the necessary components for effectively involving the users into agent-based simulations and eliciting their knowledge. We claim that at least three tasks need to be carefully undertaken: (a) The design of a 198