Participatory design for sustainable social change

1996

This paper will discuss two participatory design projects, a supports needed to make participatory design a viable option.

Artifact, 2018

The industrial revolution created a rise in mass manufacture, increasing consumption to current unsustainable levels and marking a decline in hands-on craft practice. In contemporary practice, designers frequently employ digital ways of working and, whilst this may create opportunities and efficiencies, it can limit the working of materials by hand. In contrast, hands-on craft processes can develop in-depth knowledge and understanding to help solve complex and novel design problems. With increasing use of digital design methods, it is timely to reflect on the role and value of hands-on craft practices. The study explores the use of craft-based keywords design for sustainability craft-based design hands-on design woven textiles footwear design process research

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...

Design Issues, 2012

The core of Participatory Design is the direct involvement of people in the co-design of tools, products, environments, businesses, and social institutions to ensure these work in ways that are more responsive to human needs. In particular, it has developed a diverse collection of principles and practices all aimed at directly involving people in the co-design of the technologies they use. This process has generated many of the design tools and techniques that have gone on to become best practice in the development of current information and communications technologies and product design. These include: various kinds of design workshops to collaboratively envision future products and practices; scenarios and related tools to include those who will use whatever is being designed; various forms of representations used during the process; and iterative prototyping to enable all participants in the design process to interrogate developing designs and to ground the design conversations 1 . Participatory Design has also pioneered and developed some of the basic research questions, methods and research agendas that have been taken up in the recent focus on design research 2 within more traditional design environments, including the notion of innovation through participation.

2016

This paper aims towards a critical re-evaluation of Participatory Design processes based on a completed collaborative research (2015) in rural China. The study involved two complementary disciplines; the Applied Social Sciences and Design and their corresponding research methodologies; Action Research and Participatory Design aligning the social and the physical. The resulting design and implementation of a community kitchen in rural China enabled villagers to develop social enterprises and new types of collective organizations. With Action Research providing the necessary 'software' for social organization and engagement, facilitating the development of 'hardware' or design outcomes through participatory processes. Beyond design and social outcomes, the study raised questions concerning the critical, conceptual and praxis underpinnings of Participatory Design that impact its effectiveness as a tool. Participatory Design, sometimes panacea for an objectified and corporate driven field, often remains focused on design as outcome rather than on process or the development of outcomes embedded in a social context or based on non-commercial values. Complex design processes involving multiple stakeholders in design development may also result in an oversimplified outcome or a lowest acceptable solution approach. Additionally Participatory Design understood as a purely consensual process often ignores the complex negotiations tensions and conflicts between different forms of knowledge; characterized as the 'nightmare' of Participatory Design processes (Miessen, 2010), whereas it may in fact be the tension in the process that leads to paradigm shifts and possible 'real' innovations. A viable starting point for re-evaluation of Participatory Design methodologies therefore repositions it within complex social and materialization processes; in which design outcomes become the formation of socio-material assemblies, constructed within processes that span both before and after the design stage. It is useful to contextualize this process in terms of emerging changes in social systems that are evolving the ways both the social and design processes are developing towards distributed forms of knowledge, collaborative processes and cross-disciplinary practices (Sanders and Stappers 2008). These changes are impacting the ways we understand tangible and intangible culture and the nature of artefact or object, inasmuch as design or artefact are increasingly reconfigured as a relational matrix intrinsically connected to social (and sometimes technical) contexts. In other words outcome should be considered as a design object together with its attributes and relations, or as a socio-material assembly (Latour, 1999). This highlights the importance of knowledge (generation and transfer) as parts of the interconnection of the social and the design process on the one hand, and between the different heterogeneous fields of knowledge and the negotiations these entail. The paper therefore explores how understanding the role of complex knowledge generation in the design process can lead to a critical repositioning of Participatory Design. Drawing on work by Bjögvinsson, Ehn and Hillgren (2102) who posit Participatory Design should move from a conventional understanding of designing "things" (objects) towards designing "Things" (socio-material assemblies). Their reconsideration of the etymological meaning of "Thing" as (public) assembly or as the gathering of properties or attributes is critical. In other words, "Thingness" is the socio-material assembly that Latour (1999) characterizes as "a collective of humans and non-humans," both relational and complex. The paper will also reference the 'design before design' and the 'design after design' issues highlighted by Bjögvinsson et.al., as an intrinsic part of this process.

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...