INTERACTIONS.ACM.ORG 70 INTERACTIONS NOVEMBER–DECEMBER2018
Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight
compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction
design field as a whole. — Christopher A. Le Dantec, Editor
FORUM COMMUNITY + CULTURE
development and delivery of public
services. This has created multilayered
territories in which different
organizations and communities
populate the same ground, engaging
with the same issues from different
perspectives. As a consequence, the
co-designer is often positioned in a
cumbersome situation in which they
must navigate a plurality of innovation
policies and local practices. At times,
these aspects weaken the design space,
inviting the problem of tradition and
transcendence: While design is about
creating future change, we run the risk
of staying put in the hegemony of fixed
relationships. It is no coincidence that
collaborate shares the same semantic
core with collaborateur and that the
word machine is etymologically related
to deception. These semantic and
etymological connections help illustrate
the call for designers to focus even more
on ethical issues, as they often clash
with the mundane constraints of what
participatory research can actually
achieve. The question is: How can one
Insights
→ Contemporary co-design operates
in complex clusters of stakeholder
networks, way beyond the traditional
designer/user relationship.
→ Ethical issues in co-design include
the limits of representations, the
role of preexisting accountabilities,
and the tension between tradition
and transcendence.
→ Mutual learning and collective
critical thinking are possible ways to
support designers and participants
in addressing these issues.
Per Linde and Anna Seravalli, Malmö University
Between Empowerment
and Exploitation: PD Ethics
in the Era of Participation
ethically navigate co-design projects
aimed at social change while in this
complex mesh?
Addressing this complex set of
challenges in future civic engagement,
service development, governance
issues, and critical inquiry calls for
a multidisciplinary perspective.
Although we recognize the need for
bottom-up approaches and cooperation
with grassroots movements and local
communities, we still don’t believe
that to be enough. On the contrary,
research must include policymakers,
municipal initiatives, and decision-making mechanisms within the
scope of participation in order to be
sustainable. In our engagements with
local communities and grassroots
movements, we have often hit a glass
ceiling that limited the opportunities
for participatory processes and their
outcomes to move forward. This
ceiling was made of public policies,
organizational structures, and
professional cultures that were shaped
in arenas to which both we and our
partners had limited access—for
example, public organizations or
major tech companies. Like other
co-designers, we started to engage
with these arenas by experimenting
with possible connections between
grassroots initiatives and established
organizations. This called for
experimenting with governance models
and learning new ways of doing cross-sector work. A previous discussion
in this forum also highlighted how
a new configuration of government
and citizenry is needed, one that is
relational rather than transactional, and
in which political thinking and action
When addressing societal change and civic engagement, the idea of participatory culture as
a cultivator of issue formation and
collaborative engagement has, for a
long time, been a foundational aspect
of participatory design (henceforth
co-design). It has also been a vivid and
dynamic topic of discussion in this
Interactions forum. We have observed
the ways in which the problems and
issues that design aims to address are
becoming increasingly challenging to
formulate in projects. This is because
the participating sets of stakeholders
most often are quite diverse and have
conflicting agendas and interests. To
address this complexity, participation
is becoming a widespread approach in
traditional innovation processes and in
processes aiming for societal change.
The era of participation carries both
promises of empowerment as well as
risks of exploitation. We argue that co-designers engaging with participatory
processes need to pay particular
attention to ethical concerns regarding
representation, accountability, tradition
and transcendence, and mutual
learning.
Models of co-production and
innovation that bring together industry,
academic researchers, and end users
are becoming more common. In
parallel, the European public sector
is increasingly interested in exploring
different modes of relationships with
citizens, introducing more participatory
and democratic approaches in the