Interactions - January/February 2019

• 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: