The meanings of participation in design
A collective exploration with design practitioners
As part of the Participatory Design Conference PDC 2020, I organized a bilingual workshop (EN/SP) with students, artists and design practitioners, to reflect about the meanings and nuances of participation in design. The workshop was titled “The Underlying Paths of Participation: Incorporating Feminist reflexivity and positionality in Participatory Design”.
‘The underlying paths of participation’ refers to a shift of attention from engagement with communities in participatory design, to the inward space of the designer or researcher. By looking inwards, we critically assessed and questioned our role as mediators of participatory experiences.
We began our conversations by discussing Feminist Research, as the theoretical-practical framework of this encounter. We emphasized Feminist politics of knowledge production and its critique of traditional methods, as they often delegitimize or silence forms of knowledge that aren’t normative. We examined the categorization of ‘epistemology’, ‘methodology’ and ‘method’, and highlighted the need to acknowledge and examined the role of designers and researchers as valid spaces for meaning-making.
We used a number of tools for this workshop: dialogue, a collective accordion book published online, and a visual roadmap of meanings of participation.
You can read the highlights from our conversations in this blog post.
I also wrote some reflections on the methods used in this workshop, and the facilitation experience here.
