Suchergebnisse

Today we can see new policies that suggest more participatory models to address societal challenges. The interest in design and different forms of urban labs is also increasing. This includes participatory design (PD) that has moved out of the workplace into the urban territory. In this paper we will argue that the main contribution from PD is to set up processes that can support and critically reflect on local democracy in relation to these challenges. We will look closer into the notions of commoning and agonism, two concepts that both contest the concept of participation and expand what could be required to constitute local democracy. Through a project journey spanning over seven years, we will discuss how these concepts could be used to guide processes of infrastructuring in democratic urban development processes. However, working with them poses several obstacles, including tensions between them as well as with the notion of strategic design. We will argue that in order to introduce them in a strategic design perspective, you need to consider long-term interventions and diverse levels of engagement as well as different phases where agonistic and commoning approaches are alternated with more strategic engagements of developing networks with powerful alliances.

Participatory design has become increasingly engaged in public spheres and everyday life and is no longer solely concerned with the workplace. This is not only a shift from work oriented productive activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements, but also a new milieu for production and innovation and entails a reorientation from "democracy at work" to "democratic innovation". What democratic innovation entails is currently defined by management and innovation research, which claims that innovation has been democratized through easy access to production tools and lead-users as the new experts driving innovation. We sketch an alternative "democratizing innovation" practice more in line with the original visions of participatory design based on our experience of running Malm? Living Labs - an open innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and ideas evolve from bottom-up long-term collaborations amongst diverse stakeholders. Two cases and controversial matters of concern are discussed. The fruitfulness of the concepts "Things" (as opposed to objects), "infrastructuring" (as opposed to projects) and "agonistic public spaces" (as opposed to consensual decision-making) are explored in relation to participatory innovation practices and democracy.Full text at ACM

Increasingly many Participatory Design (PD) researchers and practitioners engage in urban and public contexts, which surely are about participation and democracy, but not necessarily with a main focus on technology development. These engagements are often a part of dealing with complex societal challenges such as sustainability. Today, many different but partly overlapping denominations are used to capture these participatory practices such as: community-based PD, emerging publics, design for sharing, commons and commoning, transition and transformation design, public and social innovation, PD and urban living labs, etc. As a group of PD researchers, the "Boundary Brigade", we have engaged in this kind of work for soon a decade. At this dialogue-based hands-on workshop, we invite others with similar interests in further articulating: (1) what characterizes applying a PD approach in urban and public contexts, (2) how to understand "urban" + PD, (3) lastly, whether it is fruitful to articulate, as a more overarching concept, the (sub)domain of Urban Participatory Design. Practically we will do this through collaborative mappings with cut-ups of "personal positions", discussions and by co-producing arguments as video stories.Full text at ACM

Designers and design researchers are increasingly exploring societal challenges through engagements with issues that call forward new publics and new modes of democratic citizenship. Whatever this is called design activism, social design, adversarial design, participatory design or something else we here see design engagements which are both controversial in their commitment to agendas of social change and experimental in the sense that they openly probe for what can possibly be enacted. In this conversation we want to explore how such engagements may be seen as democratic design experiments that form a third space of re-presentation and emergent civic action between laboratory and parliament.