2-day live online workshop
December 5-6, 2024, 8:00am-12:00pm ET
Globally, there is growing awareness of the politics of design, as invisible systems of hierarchy and privilege are becoming more visible to more designers. There is increasing use of awareness-based, reflective activities in our design methodologies. However, design still colonizes people’s time, histories, bodies, knowledge, and more, even with those awareness-based activities. One difficulty is that awareness does not always lead to action and change. What does it mean to move beyond awareness to a truly participatory design?
Participation plays a large role in the power dynamics around design. Who is participating? When, where, how, and why are they participating? Usually we only think about participation in activities. Is there a way to practice participation beyond an activity, a group of activities, or a phase of work? Can participation include facilitation, decision-making, and even leading?
If you are looking for a methodology that helps you determine when you bring community members into the design process to participate and what specific methods and activities you do with them, this is not the workshop for you. We will focus on the meta-methodology Radical Participatory Design (RPD), in which community members are always present and leading and through which you conduct whatever methodology the community chooses in a fully participatory way.
This workshop will start with a short, general introduction to Participatory Design methodologies, and then specifically introduce RPD. We will explore ways to transition to RPD, team recruitment, bias awareness, transitional and rotational co-facilitation, intersectional design, asset-based design methodologies, compensation, evaluation, and RPD advocacy.
Target audience
- Researchers and designers who engage in participatory design, recognize the shortcomings, and want to improve the participation and participatory nature of the work.
- Researchers and designers who do not do participatory design but are curious and interested in moving in that direction and would like to understand the importance, goal, ideal, and guiding star of participatory design.
- Anyone interested in exploring affirming methodologies that come from different ways of valuing, knowing, and being and decolonizing participatory design.
Pre-requisites
Your lived experience and a willingness to both learn and share
Take-aways
You will be able to:
- Distinguish between terms like colonial, decolonial, and anticolonial
- Articulate the goals, benefits, and problems with participatory design
- Describe the defining characteristics of RPD and its models
- Create a qualitatively representative sample not just for design team recruitment
- List and facilitate at least three bias awareness or decentering activities that lead to action
- Describe at least one asset-based design methodology and one deficit-based methodology
- Design an ethical way of compensating team members, given a specific situation
- Evaluate a participatory design process for radicality
- Name at least three organizational barriers to RPD and at least one possible approach to address each barrier
