run the risk of romanticizing earlier participatory design, encouraging a return to a past way of thinking that no longer applies.

A related trend involves the policing of participatory design’s boundaries. This reveals itself in critiques of participatory design projects that point out the ways in which it fails to achieve democratic ideals. Such work explicitly or implicitly suggests that the object of its critique falls short of “real” participation. But there is a risk: We might move participatory design into an ideal realm that no one can achieve anymore. Indeed, there are signs that this is happening. Some researchers have begun to refer to their own work as “participatory design–like.” If “real participatory design” fades into a mythical past or exists only as a Platonic ideal, then all anyone can do today is participatory design–like. It would be unfortunate if the flagship Participatory Design Conference (PDC) became the PDLC: Participatory Design–Like Conference.

Another trend that emerged in diverse ways across many of the submissions related to the question of scale. In 1980s participatory design projects, project scale was relatively manageable: workers and managers within a single profession in a particular region, for example, nursing staff within a single hospital.

The participatory design workshops were born in and functioned at this scale, and some participatory design researchers still seem to prefer it.

Yet today, participatory design increasingly is being used to address sociological and structural problems, including new forms of marginalization, the rising power of global multinationals (such as Google and Facebook), as well as geopolitical crises such as climate change, migration, and rising authoritarian governments. Technology is contributing to new opportunities at scale—the possibility, for example, of citizen science to crowdsource scientific data collection, analysis, and even learning. We agree with the community response that scale is a major issue for participatory design, and it is far from clear how to proceed.

Yet the importance of this issue also
underscores why a return to classic
participatory design is impractical.
A particular way of addressing scale
can be found in several contributions
to the ToCHI issue that discuss the
relevance of public-sector projects to
innovative PD. The papers make the
argument that public-sector projects
are particularly in need of PD because
they are owned by our democratic
society at large, and because funding
for the projects comes from taxpayer
money. Hence, society as such has an
interest in ensuring transparency in
public-sector organizations.
Beyond this are also debates
about the need for public ownership
and control over the funding of
development projects in the public
sector: Why should public money be
spent on projects that mostly benefit
large international IT providers?
The new multinationals are not
only Facebook and Google but also
IT providers for the health and
government sectors, which can be seen
as contributing to an international
mainstreaming of how public agencies
and institutions are operated. This
runs counter to our desire for citizens
and societies to make their own choices
regarding these matters—locally.
At the same time, governments
in various parts of the world seem
to be weighed down by corruption
or authoritarian practices such
as surveillance, censorship, and
control. How does one work on
democratization in the face of a corrupt
or authoritarian state? It is indeed not
trivial to reimagine PD methods that
will truly embrace and support local
development under such conditions.
We also observed a potential
exoticization of participatory
design: research accounts of young
immigrants, non-Western cultures,
and so on. We are excited to see
participatory design asserting
democratic values in situations where
the need for democracy and justice is
so urgent; at the same time, we fear
that more mundane contexts—for
example, the provision of medical,
educational, manufacturing, and tax
services—are experiencing declines
in democratic participation because so
much of computing and information
processing is black-boxed from its
own stakeholders. We thus stress
PD’s role in asserting democratic
values in systems and infrastructural
development in all computing
situations, including situations
currently unfashionable in research
circles, because we have seen that
what were once hard-won democratic
outcomes can, and often do, degrade
over time.
Finally, we note a continuing
tension between research rigor and
the quality of intervention, a problem
not limited to participatory design
but also manifest in many action
research projects. In our view, part
of the challenge here is that we need
more pluralistic conceptions of what
counts as research, especially as
design research and participatory
design attempt to address more
political matters. We also look back
at the argument from, for example,
the original Utopia PD project, that
the challenges of PD projects open up
new research challenges, even in more
conventional understandings
of research.

PARTICIPATORY DESIGN REIMAGINED

Television cooking shows often require chefs to prepare a dish from an unorthodox set of ingredients—say, Chilean sea bass, avocado, seaweed, and popcorn balls. As perplexed audiences look on, the chefs generally succeed in producing appetizing dishes. They do so by mentally decomposing each ingredient into elements: a color, texture, taste, and so on. The problematic popcorn balls are reimagined as a crust for the sea bass, which is rolled in the crushed popcorn and deep fried.

We wonder if an approach akin to this needs to happen in participatory design. Currently problematic wholes need to be analytically broken into their constituent elements, and those elements reassigned to new methodological tasks. For example, the classic method of hosting a series of in-person participatory workshops with diverse stakeholders might not pair well with global-scale networks, yet direct engagement with different stakeholders via the sharing of breakdowns and aspirations can be achieved using new methods.

Another way to think of this is to decouple organizational scale/ granularity from issues of power. We do not believe, for example, that the larger the organization is, the more power it necessarily has. At