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At a time where computer technology is putting human lives and work under pressure, we discuss how to provide alternatives. We look back at Participatory Design (PD) which was originally about possibilities and alternatives as much as it was about specific solutions. The paper aims to revitalize and revise PD to help people influence big issues. The agenda for this is set through proposing a set of key elements for realizing new, important possibilities. We discuss the possible changes of partnership with users, call for a new role of researchers as activists, debate how to work with demanding visions for lasting impact, and democratic control. We focus on high technological ambitions, on deployment of working prototypes, on alliances, and on scaling up, all seen as important for a PD that matters. We conclude the paper with an invitation to participate in the continued discussion, codesign, and realization of a PD that matters.

In this paper, we look at how people working in a governmental labor inspection agency tailor their shared PC environment. Starting with standard off-the-shelf software, the tailors adapt that software to the particular workplace in which they are embedded, at the same time that they modify and extend the practices of that workplace. Over time, their adaptations and the tailoring processes themselves become structured and systematized within the organization. This tendency toward systematization is in part a response to the requirement that the results of tailoring be sharable across groups of users. Our study focuses on several dimensions of the work of tailoring: construction, organizational change, learning, and politics. We draw two kinds of lessons for system development: how better to support the work of tailors, and how system developers can learn from and cooperate with tailors.

Today, most design projects are infrastructuring projects, because they build on technologies, competencies and practices that already exist. While infrastructuring was originally seen as being full of conflicts and contradictions with what is already present, we find that many contemporary reports seem to mainly address participatory infrastructuring as horizontal co-design and local, mutual learning processes in which people attempt to make the most out of available technology. In this paper we expand our view of design activities in three dimensions: First, how participatory processes play out vertically in different political and practical arenas; second, on the back stage of design, the messy activities that occur before, between and after the participatory workshops. And third, on their reach; how they tie into existing networks across organizations, and how agency and initiatives become dispersed within these networks. To illustrate and discuss the process of participatory infrastructuring we use a case study from an educational context. This particular project contains a diverse set of design activities at many organizational levels revolving around technology, decision-making, competence-building, commitment and policy-making. The project highlights these complexities, and our discussions lead to a vocabulary for participatory infrastructuring that focuses on knotworking, rather than structure, and on both horizontal and vertical reach and sustainability. This vocabulary is grounded in the meeting of the literature on infrastructuring, participatory design, and activity theory, and leads to a revised understanding of, for example, learning and conflicts in participatory infrastructuring.

In the early days of digital technology development, design was done 'for', 'with' or 'by' the users based on the assumption that users were real people. Today 'users' have become a component in mass-market production and are seen as 'customers', rather than people. Still designers need to address use, and personas have been introduced for this purpose. The paper uses research on user participation and research-based personas from the eGov+ project to discuss whether personas help designers engage with users. In this project, design was carried out in the domain of municipal services through involvement of clerks, management and citizens from three different municipalities. Through four cases we discuss if applying personas in participatory design settings is productive to designers' understanding of users' use situations. Does deployment of personas bring designers closer to the actual use situation? In which ways do personas help design for, with or by the users? Do personas support participatory design?Full text at ACM