Accepted Full Papers
Programme
FP1: PD to uncover, reclaim, and recover in community
Session Chair: Shaimaa Lazem
Tuesday (13/08/2024) 1100
Authors: Dhriti Dhaundiyal; Nishant Sharma
Public transportation systems play a pivotal role in ensuring equitable access to urban resources. However, marginalized demographics frequently encounter complex forms of exclusion while using various modes of public transportation. This is often a result of following quantitative requirement capture methods that neglect to include tacit needs of marginalized users. This paper presents a participatory research study aimed at co-producing knowledge pertaining to Permanent, Temporary, and Situational Exclusion. The study deployed scaled-down mannequins as probes in generative participatory design workshops with female bus users in a Tier II city of India. Tailored discussion probes, meticulously designed to contextualize the inquiry, catalyzed the articulation of distinctive viewpoints on exclusion. Consequently, latent requirements, often concealed from conventional research methods, were revealed.We found that these concrete probes encouraged the workshop participants to discuss exclusions in a humane manner, bringing up their past experience of dealing with these situations and suggesting empathetic design solutions.
Authors: Brenda Victoria; Vertiz Marquez
While Participatory Design (PD) orients its interest in the public space and infrastructuring– the ongoing work that sustains collaborative efforts over time – it has yet to delve into how such work unfolds in contexts marked by inequalities. Through a case study of an ongoing project consisting of co-creating tactical public space interventions in Mexico City’s colonias populares, this paper tackles this imbalance. Reflecting retrospectively on the project’s journey, this paper articulates eight work types: experimentation, anticipation, territorial, play, relational, articulation, translation and maintenance work as central to producing and reproducing the project and each intervention. It applies a feminist social reproduction lens to draw attention to the ‘invisible’ everyday work extending beyond more ‘visible’ design practices within each work type. The discussion encourages a more critical understanding of infrastructural work over a wider range of experiences and conditions that current design’s enduring production approaches have examined thus far.
Authors: Chris Muashekele; Kasper Rodil; Heike Winschiers-Theophilus; Shorty Kandjengo
This paper, contributing to decolonial design and futuring practice, promotes and explores the recovery of lost futures of the past. Through a series of sessions in a rural indigenous community in Southern Africa, we employ the Chameleon Innovation game as a participatory and community-based ideation method to co-design alternative future innovations and possibilities. The game, as an avenue through which participants accentuate lost indigenous cultural practices from the past, extends an Afrocentric indigenous orientation and past trajectory, enabling participants to actively engage these practices and situate alternative futures. This widens the spectrum within which futures and technologies are co-designed, enabling community participants to actively conceptualise alternative, yet situated, innovations in rural indigenous contexts.
Authors: Simran Chopra; Harvey Patrick Everson; John Vines
This paper reports on participatory engagements conducted with four marginalised communities located in post-industrial towns in Scotland. Our engagements focused on exploring how new forms of “value exchange” between community members might be facilitated and infrastructured. These towns suffer from inadequate public infrastructure, austerity and a disconnection from other nearby places. These communities still rely on close-knit relationships with neighbours, family and friends to be resilient to these challenges. The research examines these informal interpersonal interactions to look at their potential for creating sustained community value exchange. We developed a monopoly-inspired boardgame to surface, track and quantify these community interactions within the gameplay. Our findings present the boardgame as a tool for infrastructuring existing exchanges and new ways of building social connections and social capital within local neighbourhoods. The paper contributes towards understanding of infrastructuring mutual value exchange and re-designing incentivisation through value to address the longitudinally in volunteer-driven contexts. participants to actively conceptualise alternative, yet situated, innovations in rural indigenous contexts.
FP2: Hierarchy and collaboration in PD
Session Chair: Erik Grönvall
Wednesday (14/08/2024) 1330
Authors: Yoko Akama; Ko-Le Chen; Hirotake Imanishi; Yuko Kikuchi; Sarah Kushinsky; Sarah Teasley; Khemmiga Teerapong; Joyce Yee
Participatory design (PD) often prioritises being vocal and equal as signs of empowerment in enabling social change. But what can such preference inadvertently ignore, like silence and passivity? What relationships might be prevented or put at risk when hierarchies are flattened? This paper examines the subtle and relational power dynamics experienced as various hierarchies that shape multitudinous interactions. We identify hierarchies that embody relationalities such as respect, intimacy, and learning, configured through cultural structures and commitments. We distinguish these plural ‘respectful hierarchies’ to contrast with ‘disempowering hierarchy’ to prevent collapsing vertical power structures. We share discoveries from reflexively attending to unspoken, overshadowed dimensions in a transcultural mentoring program that brought together women in Asia and Australia to support their personal and professional development. In recasting hierarchy, we join with emerging movements to expand PD’s intersectionally situated practices that support social change, as part of embracing plurality of worldviews.
Authors: Bronwyn Cumbo; Rowena Potts
Child-initiated, adult-supported forms of participation are generally regarded as an authentic form of child participation. Within PD however, this type of participation is rarely supported; children are generally invited into a PD process after research has been defined, scoped, and initiated. Here, we introduce a four-part participatory film method designed to support children reveal child-specific knowledges about their everyday lives, and together with adults identify priority areas that can form the starting point for design. We illustrate the application of this method through the Our Water Stories project, carried out with seven children (10 – 11 years) over six weeks in 2022 to understand their everyday experiences of water. Our analysis revealed three types of child-specific knowledges related to water: water perspectives, sensorial knowledges, and reflections on their voice. These are translated into three child-initiated design problems that we intend to explore in future research.
Authors: Abd Alsattar Ardati; Angela Miguel; Alex Voss
Wikipedia, while being one of the most successful projects for open knowledge curation, faces significant challenges that stem partly from the model for collaboration that is used, in which individual contributions are aggregated into a whole through a bureaucratic process. This process is hierarchical and reflects power relationships that hinder the further evolution of Wikipedia as a community effort by setting up significant barriers to entry for new editors as well as hindering contributions on a range of topics. We employ the frame of “care and efficiency” introduced by Rossitto et al. to describe a distributed participatory design process to introduce synchronous collaboration into parts of the Wikipedia community’s activities, specifically training and projects, two areas in which the care aspect is of particular importance.
Authors: Roel Roscam Abbing; Ann Light
This paper follows the development of a participatory platform as part of an arts exhibition involving 53 arts collectives, predominantly from the Global South. While the platform was global in scope and designed with worldwide participation from intended users, this participation was impacted in significant ways by the local European laws that the exhibition makers had to abide by. We describe how the socio-legal elements constrained participation and the development of the platform’s features. We reflect on the impact of bad faith actors, the power imbalances involved in the design project and the disappointing outcome – a platform with no obvious users. In doing so, we visit key moments in its production and explore the context for what it can teach us about managing the broader impacts of globalised legal norms on cultural producers and radical arts practice. We use actor-networks to show the play of colonialism and capitalism.
FP3: Knowledge building, transfer, and evaluation in PD
Session Chair: Amanda Geppert
Thursday (15/08/2024) 0900
Authors: Eva Brandt; Maria Foverskov
This paper contributes to the participatory design field with a better understanding of situated, relational, and embodied design roles during community-based participatory design projects. By presenting performative encounters from a Design and Living Lab and notions from performance studies, two performative modes of participation are described as rehearsing and performing. The paper argues for two practices: one of looping for diverging the design space when rehearsing, and one of tuning for converging when performing. Embodied techniques for staging participation such as props and infrastructuring elements are emphasised for distributing ownership to all participants in a long-term multi-stakeholder partnership. Rehearsing and performing are not about single situations being mocked-up, but about their interrelated connections and how contextualised and relational practices are co-produced among stakeholders. We argue that the stories presented as encounters of performing from the Living Lab are only able to flourish in the situated context of performing.
Authors: Jörn Christiansson; Erik Grönvall; Joanna Saad-Sulonen
Participatory design has struggled in the context of large public systems development. Two decades ago, PD researchers addressed these issues in a “reformist PD agenda”, inviting PD practitioners to consider participation in public sector development, assess paradigm claims and revitalise the political perspective of PD. Today’s digitalisation wave, with public digital services becoming the only option for citizen interaction with authorities, reveals digital inequalities in society that once again puts focus on civic agency in public sector design. This paper investigates user participation in digital public service design through an empirical study, composed by twelve semi-structured interviews with key actors in digitalizing public services in Denmark, followed by a thematic analysis. The study highlights how the national digital strategy, procurement processes, available competence and other factors shape user participation in public sector design. Based on these findings, we reflect on the potential role of PD in contemporary public sector design.
Authors: Valeria Gryada; Eevi Juuti; Aulikki Herneoja; Emilia Rönkkö
This paper aims to understand the phenomenon of knowledge transfer between architects and service designers during participatory design processes in architectural design projects. While the relationship between designers and end-users in participatory design is well-researched, little is known about the interdisciplinary interactions within the design teams in this context. The findings of this paper are based on 18 interviews of architects, interior architects, and service designers, touching upon themes such as their experiences of mutual collaboration, roles, attitudes, and challenges, including knowledge transfer. These interviews were analysed using the open-ended Grounded Theory Method (GTM) to mitigate contamination with the authors’ professional experiences and to understand relationships and interactions between the key actors: architects and service designers. Based on the findings, the intensive and continuous forms of collaboration and the personal capabilities of the key actors significantly increased successful interdisciplinary knowledge transfer.
Authors: Quynh Nguyen; Emma Jaspaert; Birgit Harthum
Participatory Design (PD) has become a versatile, often-used design practice. However, its legitimacy is often criticised due to a lack of empirically backed benefits or impact. This impedes PD’s ability to convey its benefits to its stakeholders, other disciplines, and society at large, making progress in the field more difficult. One way to address these criticisms is using systematic evaluations in PD. While evaluation frameworks for PD exist, they are rarely used or built upon, and results from evaluations are seldom disseminated. Thus, this paper presents a systematic evaluation of the first year of a participatory project for developing a Virtual Reality training system as a case study. We discuss the impacts of systematic, explicit evaluations on PD practitioners, the PD community, and beyond. The work, therefore, contributes to establishing and developing evaluation as a practice in PD to enhance knowledge-building and accountability.
FP4: Infrastructural speculations and traversing temporalities in PD
Session Chair: Konstantin Aal
Thursday (15/08/2024) 1100
Authors: Violeta Tsenova; Maurizio Teli; Joëlla van Donkersgoed; Thomas Cauvin
In this paper, we relate participatory design (PD) scholarship with public history (PH) research, deepening the understanding of the relationship of PD with history, focusing on ‘history with PD’. The latter refers to when history itself is explicitly the object of participation, and we discuss it by presenting a secondary analysis of a PH project, HistorEsch, conducted through the conceptual lens of infrastructuring. In this way, we show how PD and PH practices consider the past of a place and how they relate to public formation, intermediation, and proliferation.
Authors: Naveen Bagalkot; Siddhant Shinde; Nervo Verdezoto; Ganief Manuel; Muni Ramakka; Ndinelao Iitumba; Deysi Ortega; Tb Dinesh; Melissa Densmore
Community Networks (CNs) offer a means for high-quality communication infrastructure growth especially in rural areas providing benefits to the social and economic development; CNs hold potential to be community owned infrastructure fostering community resilience. Towards realizing this potential of CNs, we explored two research questions: What does resilience mean for the communities who build, maintain, and use a CN; and what are community-based visions for fostering resilience and sustainability of their CNs? We carried out a four speculative design workshops with different stakeholders at two CNs: Ocean View Community’s CN in South Africa and the Channapatna Health Library’s CN in India. We report our findings as two design fictions that emerged as collaborative articulation of our collective visions, acting as ‘Infrastructural Speculations’ nuancing our understanding of resilience in CNs. We offer insights into how speculative design could become a part of ongoing, situated participatory design and infrastructuring work
Authors: Alex Jiahong Lu; Eleanor Villafranca Wikstrom; Tawanna R Dillahunt
Participatory Design scholars and practitioners have embraced speculative design approaches to challenge normative assumptions about sociotechnical futures and address the systemic lack of racial and class diversity in futuring. This paper draws upon a community-based participatory speculative design (PSD) project conducted with a group of working-class Detroiters, focusing on speculating about alternative community economies. We illustrate how PSD served as a process of ongoing “contamination” where the boundaries of community members’ visions of desired futures are opened up, troubled, and negotiated on the individual, alliance, and collective levels, thus forming new commons for collaboration and political resistance across differences. For them, such contamination was a reflexive process aimed at identifying whose visions were excluded from their own and how community-held sociotechnical imaginary could emerge through collaboration. We argue that foregrounding contamination in PSD makes meaningful space for fostering reflexivity in knowledge production, while destablizing and reassembling more inclusive sociotechnical futures.
Authors: Kristina Lindström; Li Jönsson; Per-Anders Hillgren
This paper explores and proposes a prototypical pedagogy for orienteering post-carbon futures. The pedagogy has been explored in the form of a designerly study circle that involved 1) visiting places in which different futures could be sensed, 2) narrating pasts, nows, and futures, and 3) material explorations and forms of grief and hope. The figure of orienteering is used as an alternative to figures of roadmaps. Whereas roadmaps are guided by an optimism that takes the future for granted and does not invite citizens’ engagement, the figure of orienteering calls for familiarising oneself with uncertain terrains and exploring multiple paths towards the future. To restore a sense of commitment and involvement to the unfolding future, we suggest the notions of grief and hope as both practical and conceptual orienteering devices.
FP5: Lived experience and the participatory design of technology
Session Chair: Bronwyn Cumbo
Friday (16/08/2024) 0900
Authors: Heidi Bråthen
This paper explores the role of experience in nurturing the technological imagination of ageing adults during the design and use of digital technologies. Participatory design (PD) approaches have been successful in including individuals with limited technological competence. However, this user group has been less involved in design phases related to implementation and adaptation. This negatively affects their participation. To address this, we ask if there is something particular about their technological imagination to find ways to bring participants closer to the technical side of design. We report on a design process with older adults in [anonymized] where we held weekly design workshops for ten months. We found that while ageing adults have vast experience, many have less experience with digital technologies. To nurture the technological imaginations of ageing adults, our findings highlight the need to balance attention to individual attitudes and structural factors affecting experiences with digital technologies.
Authors: Gubing Wang; Dena Kasraian; Yuan Lu; William Hurst; Marielle Jambroes; Pieter van Wesemael
Ensuring the design process aligns with active aging is as crucial as designing products for older adults promoting active aging. An emerging approach is to bring together OA with younger generations to collaborate on solutions for active aging via intergenerational hackathons. This study explored the intangible outcomes of an intergenerational hackathon aimed at promoting active aging. This hackathon was organized by an interdisciplinary team together with a senior center, and a mixed methods approach was applied to understand the experiences of participants during the hackathon and their reflections. The intangible outcomes were identified and mapped based on the scale of their effects on active aging, indicating intergenerational hackathons could be a lasting approach to foster active aging. Design implications for conducting this type of hackathon were formulated, and we position our findings as the starting point for researchers and practitioners exploring intergenerational hackathons as an approach to active aging.
Authors: Netta Iivari; Leena Ventä-Olkkonen; Heidi Hartikainen; Sumita Sharma
Inspired by participatory design, children have been invited to participate in the development of technology and to critically approach technology and its consequences in their everyday life and society. It has been argued that children’s computing education should encourage them to adopt a critical, reflective and constructive stance towards computing. Although valuable work has been conducted, there is room for improvement regarding participatory design that ‘matters’ and regarding children adopting such a critical, reflective and constructive stance towards societal matters. We have enriched children’s computing education with participatory design combined with activism education. We showcase how we have done that and outline children’s experiences. We identify ways by which our work entailing participatory design with children can be seen to ‘matter’ and by which the tenets of activism education have been included, but also limitations in both respects. Our insights enable participatory design with children to move towards such that ‘matters’.
Authors: Priyanka Sebastian; Sumita Sharma; Netta Iivari; Marianne Kinnula; Charu Monga; Deepanshu Verma; Muhammad Shahroz Abbas
Emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, robots, and virtual reality, are reshaping our world, and driving educational transformations globally, revolutionizing traditional learning. Existing research has pointed out the need to address emerging technologies as part of computational empowerment of children. However, there is little research of computational empowerment of children from teachers’ perspective so far. Based on data from workshop with public school teachers in India, we advocate for an organized integration of smart technologies with an ethical emphasis in the curriculum. Furthermore, we delve into educators’ perspectives, exploring their aspirations, needs, challenges, and concerns, offering insights into the future of education.
