COVER STORY
Insights

→ There is a pervasive sense in the community that participatory design has lost some of its clarity and identity.

→ We recommend that
PD look for ward, not
backward, and specifically
that it focus on what
democracy means today
and integrate new methods
into PD.
have also been inspired by material in
the journal CoDesign’s special issue on
“Unfolding Participation over Time
in the Design of IT” [ 4] and the 2017
special issue of the CSC W Journal on
“Infrastructuring and Collaborative
Design” [ 5].
These projects and others
collectively suggest a willingness in
the PD community to step back, take
stock, and reflect on PD as an approach
to design and research. Why is there a
need for this now? Is there something
about PD today that has become
somehow problematic, in that so many
take this reflexive turn? Does PD no
longer work? Has it lost its coherence?
We recently edited a special issue of the

ACM ToCHI journal on “Reimagining Participatory Design” [ 1]. 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 and 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 [ 2, 3, etc.]. We

Reimagining

Participatory Design Liam Bannon, University of Limerick and the Participatory IT Centre at Aarhus University Jeffrey Bardzell, Indiana University and the Participatory IT Centre at Aarhus University Susanne Bødker, Aarhus University and the Participatory IT Centre at Aarhus University INTERACTIONS.ACM.ORG JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2019 INTERACTIONS 27

I M A G E B Y O P T I M A R CW