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