• A sense that participatory design
has lost some of its clarity and/or
identity
• A concern that participatory
design has been depoliticized,
dropping its original commitments
to democracy and dialogue in favor of
more consumer-oriented methods
• Questions about how well the
original so-called Scandinavian model
applies to the rest of the world, or even
to Scandinavia today
• Concerns that computer users
worldwide have lost ground in terms of
their rights and grievance procedures
• Questions about how well
participatory design can scale, from the
interventions with small teams of the
past to more global concerns
• Concern about the future of the
participatory design community, given
that many of the founding thinkers
are retiring and a new cadre of activist
researchers is required.
All of these lead us to ask: Has
participatory design fallen into a state
of decadence? And how can we attempt
to revitalize it? The ToCHI journal Call
for Papers on Reimagining PD was our
response, one of many that we hope
will emerge in the near future.
THE COMMUNITY RESPONDS
As we initiated our plans for the special
issue of ToCHI, we solicited research
contributions that would reimagine
PD—that would take the present into
full account and seek to envision a
future that is true to PD’s past while
also reshaping or molding it to fit
changing circumstances.
The large number of responses
we received to our initial call was
gratifying, showing that the topic
engaged the larger research and
practice community. Some of the
responses are outlined below.
One of the most conspicuous trends
across our submissions: attempts to
offer histories of participatory design,
including new interpretations of 1980s
PD projects. In many cases these
historical contributions suggested
a return to more profound or more
“pure” forms of participatory design.
We read this trend as a response to the
apparent dilution of the field: The trend
seems to suggest that if we just remind
ourselves of what classic participatory
design was really about, we would
be better able to get it right today.
However, we worry that researchers
Has it been co-opted and corrupted? In
this article, we seek to account for the
questioning within PD of its purpose
at the present moment and to make a
constructive contribution to the debate
by offering some thoughts on ways to
move forward.
THE RISE (AND FALL?)
OF PARTICIPATORY DESIGN
When the topic “participatory design
of information technology in the
workplace” emerged in the 1970s,
it sought to rebalance power and
agency in the professional realm. This
was a time when, in many Western
countries, social democratic parties
held sway, a majority of workers
belonged to trade unions, collective
bargaining agreements were common,
and social welfare provisions were
sacrosanct. Hence, workers and
their organizations were seeking to
establish fora and methods to influence
the development of information
technology locally, nationally, and
internationally, and this kind of
engagement was seen as part of
democratic agendas across the board.
The PD approach aroused
considerable interest, as it provided
both a theoretical rationale along with
concrete methods for involving users. It
appeared to get results, too, in the form
of products that had high buy-in from
diverse stakeholders. In the 1990s and
2000s, PD research developed further
to include a strong interest in cases and
methods from many fields, regardless
of whether these had a specific focus on
computer technology, coinciding with
the emergence of a general interest in
design in the larger HCI field. Common
to the cases and methods: They
involved and engaged people from
many walks of life.
Today the political, social,
economic, and technical environments
within which discussions about
participatory design take place have
shifted significantly. The relations
among labor unions, corporations,
and governments have changed.
Technology has facilitated the
emergence of increasingly autonomous
systems, which act and make
decisions based on algorithms that few
understand let alone shape, as well as
global networks and datasets of such
scale that they can be managed only by
computational systems.
Meanwhile, we argue in [ 6] that the
label participatory design seems to have
become synonymous with a banal form
of user-centered design, concentrating
on more local issues of usability and
user satisfaction. Such a view sees
participation as simply the involvement
of any stakeholders at any point in the
process. This is a far cry from earlier
work in the field, where participatory
design sought not only to incorporate
users in design, but also to intervene
in situations of conflict through
developing more democratic processes.
Conflict and power were fundamental
concepts in early participatory design,
but these issues are often no longer
addressed. Rather, we read about how
technology “empowers” individuals,
ignoring the fact that this often occurs
at someone else’s expense.
At the same time, technologies
and their accompanying methods
and techniques are spreading across
the globe, now reaching remote
villages in developing countries,
for example. In such settings, the
original Scandinavian values and
assumptions that shaped PD are often
culturally at odds. This manifests
in an apparent dilemma: Do design
teams “compromise” PD by loosening
its egalitarian politics? Or do they
impose their own values onto these
participants, as methodological
and ideological colonialists?
However this dilemma is navigated,
participatory design must change in
such contexts. The concerns raised
about the PD field have been many
and varied, including:
It would be unfortunate if the flagship
Participatory Design Conference
(PDC) became the PDLC: Participatory
Design–Like Conference.
COVER STORY