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2017, Design Issues
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The different traditions in design participation have overlooked the relationship between imagination and the political when discussing the sources of legitimacy in participatory projects. Whether it is in architecture, planning, or design, many practitioners and scholars base their approaches to participation on what we consider an artificial exclusion between the what and the how of design, respectively understood as results and procedures. We suggest that there might be an interesting opportunity in avoiding this binary opposition, and in considering the construction of the design problem as the true what of design.
CoDesign, 2020
In this paper we draw upon the articles included in this special issue to question how to re-politicise co-design and participatory design (PD). Many authors in these fields have recently made a plea to reengage with 'big issues' as a way to address this concern. At the same time, there is an increased attention into the micro-politics of the relations that are built-in co-design and PD. These two approaches are sometimes presented as working against each other with a depoliticising dynamic as a result. The editorial hypothesis of this issue is that designing visions can turn the tension between addressing the big issues and close attention to the particularity of relations into a motor for re-politicising design. Through engaging with literature, the articles presented in this issue, and two fieldwork cases that explore this dynamic, we discovered that paying careful attention to the activity of designing visions can support re-politicisation. While visions enable us to develop relations with close attention to their politics, building relations supports a more political approach to designing visions on issues. We argue that vision-making can particularly support re-politicisation when it enables the articulation of the political by relating its situated reality to how it unfolds in space and time.
Design Issues
In design research, critique has recently been voiced against the multiple ways the notion of participation is understood and practiced. Studies of performativity and performance art have been used to account for this methodological multiplicity. However, in this article, we argue that participation still has much to offer design research as a foundational concept, but that a more nuanced understanding is required. Further, we offer such an understanding by presenting three theories and methodologies from participatory art. The value of participatory art for design research will then be exemplified by a practice-based design research project exploring forms of patient democracy.
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2016
The paper explores what exactly it is that users participate in when being involved in participatory design (PD), relating this discussion to the CSCW perspective on collaborative design work. We argue that a focus on decision-making in design is necessary for understanding participation in design. Referring to Schön we see design as involving creating choices, selecting among them, concretizing choices and evaluating the choices. We discuss how these kinds of activities have played out in four PD projects that we have participated in. Furthermore, we show that the decisions are interlinked, and discuss the notion of decision linkages. We emphasize the design result as the most important part of PD. Finally, participation is discussed as the sharing of power, asking what the perspective of power and decision-making adds to the understanding of design practices.
Design Philosophy Papers, 2013
A range of alternative formulations of design, such as ‘social’, ‘activist’, ‘critical’, ‘relational’, ‘humanitarian’ design, are amassing.[1] Instead of focusing on form and function, such formulations typically focus on what design produces. At stake in the social turn within design is reconsideration of what design is about – not in terms of its objects but, and perhaps even more fundamentally, its subjects. Further, contemporary design oriented toward the public realm in multiple contexts involves a diversity of possible subjects and political subjectivities. ‘Participation’ has been an approach to addressing social questions in design. Participation has been linked, for example, to “a mindset and attitude about people” [2] and a kind of ‘design humanism’ aimed at reducing domination,[3] which meets the human ideal of mutual support for altruism, a ‘collective instinct of humanity’.[4] In a range of associated projects and practices in recent years, methodologies have been applied to involve more or different people directly in product development processes. Indeed, participation may itself be seen as the objective of design processes.[5] Concern, however, often tends towards methods for improving design objects, with certain questions about its subjects left under-examined or posed in overly general and loaded terms that might be further interrogated. In this paper, we query participation in design in order to discuss some of the problematics of relating to ‘others’ in practices of design and design research. We argue, as do other design thinkers, for practices involving “micro-political participation in the production of space”,[6] in which design frames and stages the (re)production of social as well as spatial relations. We argue for increased reflexivity about how others participate in design and the political implications. Here, ‘the political’ refers to the issue of who is identified and represented as a subject in studies and practices of design. Concerned with the social organization of everyday life, the design role is always engaged with “confrontation of power relations and influence by the identification of new terms and themes for contestation and new trajectories for action”.[7]
Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on …, 2008
This paper discusses the design of things. This is done in an attempt to conceptually explore some of the political and practical challenges to participatory design today. Which things, and which participants? The perspective is strategic and conceptual. Two approaches are in focus, participatory design (designing for use before use) and meta-design (designing for design after design). With this framing the challenge for professional design to participate in public controversial things is considered.
2012
This article is a call to describe Participatory Design (PD) projects in the making, i.e. to show how the heterogeneous elements in the field are gradually organised in a participatory manner as the projects progress. It is based on two arguments. The first is a negative argument. Very often, PD projects are not described in the making. As a result, the landmarks to be used to evaluate them remain unclear or invisible. The second argument is of a more positive nature. The articles that do describe projects in the making enable landmarks to be defined that can be effectively used to evaluate PD projects. The notion of emerging groups is one of these landmarks.
Design Science
Outside of community-led design projects, most participatory design processes initiated by a company or organisation maintain or even strengthen power imbalances between the design organisation and the community on whose purported behalf they are designing, further increasing the absencing experience. Radical participatory design (RPD) is a radically relational answer to the coloniality inherent in participatory design where the community members’ disappointment is greater due to the greater expectations and presencing potential of a ‘participatory design’ process. We introduce the term RPD to show how research and design processes can be truly participatory to the root or core. Instead of treating participatory design as a method, a way of conducting a method, or a methodology, we introduce RPD as a meta-methodology, a way of doing any methodology. We explicitly describe what participation means and compare and contrast design processes based on the amount of participation, creatin...
ICDHS Taipei, 2016
The idea of design as an art made not only for the people, but also by the people is an old dream going back at least to William Morris. It is, however, reappearing vigorously in many kinds of design activism and grows out of the visions of a Total Design of society. The ideas of participation by Tim Brown can be compared to considerations by László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropuis on the training and education of active and capable citizens. This opens, though, some dilemmas to discuss: To what extend is the capability of creativity then a (pre)condition to be a citizen of the society wished for? To which degree should everyone be educated in 'design literacy' to participate? Total design of participation is an artistic intervention in society and must be discussed in this utopian tradition.
Design Studies, 1982
This paper looks at developments in architectural design techniques over the past few decades. It challenges some recurring assertions about participatory design in architecture. In particular, it responds to a critical debate at the Design Research Society conference held at Portsmouth (UK) in December 1980, by suggesting that if participatory design methods have shortcomings these should not automatically be levelled at the tenets of public participation, but primarily at the means currently employed to involve building users in the architectural design process. In conclusion, a redefinition and a diversification of participatory architectural design methods is suggested. It is inherent in our intellectual activity that we seek to imprison 'reality' in our description of it. Soon, long before we realize it, it is we who become the prisoners of our description. From that point on our ideas degenerate into a kind of folklore which we pass to each other, fondly thinking we are still talking of the "reality" around us. (Bevan ~
This doctoral design research thesis documents a process of rethinking user participation in the design of the urban built environment. It investigates options for the roles of architects and designers as generators and facilitators of design processes that enable designing with people. Its aim is to investigate the tactical knowledge of participation in design and explore how architects’ and designers’ knowledge can be transferred to, shared with and developed together with non-experts. First of all, the theoretical discourse centres on Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between the ‘abstract space’ of designers and experts and the ‘concrete space’ of people and day-to-day life, in spatial practice. This dialectic model of space was developed as an analytical tool to define, understand and re-appropriate the term ‘participation’ in the environmental design field. This new Design Participation analytical tool is then further developed to demonstrate two contributions of this design research. The first contribution is through a critical assessment of different practices of Design Participation, as first defined in the 1971 Design Participation Conference in Manchester (UK) organised by the Design Research Society (DRS), to provide a new viewpoint to understand design practices with participation. Different Design Participation practices were assessed for their appropriateness and effectiveness within past and current contexts, and in different stages and tasks within the design process. Practices within the realm of collaboration between the abstract space of designers and the concrete space of users were tested through a comparative study of design participation projects in three social contexts: Sweden, the United Kingdom (London) and Hong Kong, in which different social attitudes to design prevail. A rethought definition and typology of design participation was developed based on relations between the two ‘worlds’ of experts/designers and users/people. This new understanding of Design Participation is articulated with a new Design Participation Benchmark and Taxonomy. The research endeavours to define Design Participation Tactics that avoid mere ‘tokenism’ and aims at articulating tactics for a transformation of the traditionally conceived process of design. Through action research methodology, the second contribution of this research is to further define the term ‘participation’ within the greater social context and its relation to the subject of design by learning through doing. Three levels of Design Participation Tactics were introduced which are working with three newly defined modes of participation: Community, Public and Design Participation. The Design Participation analytical tool was used to compare different practices between different modes of participation. The relevance and validity of the research is supported through real-world cases involving co-designing with grass-roots user groups, children’s groups and older users, as well as collaboration with professional designers of housing, exhibitions and other types of environments, and other disciplines such as social work and public policy. The re-writing of the roles of designers, architects and other ‘experts’ in the design process is an important component in achieving Design Participation. Positions on the agendas, methodologies and epistemologies involved in the Design Participation process were developed during this study. ‘Agenda’ refers to how the Design Participation process addresses the social context, reflecting social changes and needs. ‘Methodology’ applies to devising holistic Design Participation processes developed through working with users and matching appropriate tactics to each different situation. ‘Epistemology’ evokes the important question of how Design Participation tactics can be transferred to become a foundation and tool for future development. The pursuit of increasing user participation in the design process implies a realignment of designers’ roles (generator, facilitator and developer) from that of producing objects, environments and systems, to that of facilitating innovative collaboration and creating platforms for social inclusion in design practice.
Design Studies, 1996
Participatory design is the antithesis of traditional design in which designers are expected to exhibit their expertise. The right to participate in design is often ignored and even when it is accepted, many obstacles including perceived pragmatic economic de ciencies and organizational concerns, impede participation. This paper criticizes the foundations of traditional design and elaborates some features of participation in various design disciplines particularly in the context of architectural design and urban planning. An approach to participation founded on widening communication channels among participants is presented. Finally, the potential applications of computer tools for supporting participation is discussed.
CoDesign, 2015
This article starts from the paradox that, although participation is a defining trait of participatory design (PD), there are few explicit discussions in the PD literature of what constitutes participation. Thus, from a point of departure in Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this article develops an analytical understanding of participation. It is argued that participation is a matter of concern, something inherently unsettled, to be investigated and explicated in every design project. Specifically, it is argued that (1) participation is an act overtaken by numerous others, rather than carried out by individuals and (2) that participation partially exists in all elements of a project. These traits are explicated in a design project called 'Teledialogue', where the participants are unfolded as networks of reports, government institutions, boyfriends, social workers and so on. The argument is synthesised as three challenges for PD:
Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference on - PDC '10, 2010
The field of Strategic Design supports designers in researching and designing for the complexity of today's cities by embracing the idea of strategic dialogue, in which designers align with different actors and their interests. In this article, we discuss how democratic dialogues-foregrounded in the Participatory Design (PD) tradition-play a role in complex urban design processes (i.e. 'infrastructuring') and entail different types of dialogues of which strategic dialogue is merely one. After framing Strategic Design and PD, we describe five designer roles and their associated dialogues. This description forms the basis of an exploratory typology of democratic dialogues that was applied and exemplified in a case study about a Living Lab in the neighbourhood of Genk. The Lab attempts to design alternative futures for work in the city together with citizens, public and private organisations. We claim that engaging with this typology allows designers to understand and design infrastructuring processes in the urban context and to open up different design dialogues and roles for discussion.
Nordes 2017: Design and Power, 2017
The case study presented here is an intensive nineday community participation project in a Swiss town, aimed at fostering community food production. The approach to participatory design presented here seeks to emphasize the in-situ improvisatory 'doing' of collaborative activities. Using notions such as diffusing, reifying and catalyzing the study describes the iterative movement of the project that is bound up in material arrangements and social relations. Through a reflection in action approach, the author unpacks how the designer's agency is understood through social interactions and acts of summarizing, materialization and translation. The paper concludes by discussing power and agency, both as an outcome and central to the design process. This reflective exploration through the lens of agency seeks to encourage the reflexivity of designers in collaborative practice.
2021
Participatory design is an attitude about a force for change in the creation and management of environments for people. Its strength lies in being a movement that cuts across traditional professional boundaries and cultures. Its roots lie in the ideals of a participatory democracy where collective decision-making is highly decentralized throughout all sectors of society, so that all individuals learn participatory skills and can effectively participate in various ways in the making of all decisions that affect them. Increasingly complex decision-making processes require a more informed citizenry that has considered the evidence on the issue, discussed potential decision options and arrived at a mutually agreed upon decision (Abelson et al, 2003).Today participatory design processes are being applied to urban design, planning, and geography as well as to the fields of industrial and information technology. Research findings suggest that positive outcomes are associated with solutions...
Interactions, 2018
We recently edited a special issue of the ACM ToCHI journal on Re-Imagining Participatory Design (Bannon et al. 2018a) and as a result of this process, and the earlier work leading up to it, we have had many interesting discussions concerning Participatory Design (PD) and where it stands today. We refer the reader to the ToCHI special issue for details of the various contributions, but present here some further discussion of the themes that emerged as we ourselves discussed this topic of reimagining PD. The history of the field, and the ongoing debates about the general concept of "participation," have been discussed elsewhere (Simonsen and Robertson 2012, Vines et al. 2013, etc.). We have also been inspired by material in the CoDesign journal special issue on "Unfolding Participation over Time in the
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