Join us at Civic Design 2022, November 16-18

Day 3-Radical Participatory Design: Decolonizing Participatory Design Processes

— Thank you and it’s good to be here

 

— Welcome to this conversion on radical participatory design, where I’ll talk about its benefits, history, and application

 

— I’d also like to give a greeting and land acknowledgement from Washington DC
  • These acknowledgement don’t change the allocation of power resources, but work at the mythological level to change our conception of the past
    • What matters is whether a mythology is living or dead, and land acknowledgements help bring a piece of land and its people to life
— Join as we uncover past histories in participatory design

 

 

— Most scholars will tell you, homo sapiens appeared around 350,000 years a go, and most people say participatory design began in  Scandinavia in the 1970s
  • Other people date as starting with Karl Linn and Jane Jacobs in the 1960s
  • Still others say Lippit, Lewin, and Radke came up with the concept in the 1940s.
— This says though that the bulk of history of homo sapiens has had zero participatory design. Really?

 

— What if design is taking information, coming up with an idea, and then trying it out?
  • That means there are likely other forms of participatory design

 

—For example, Griots in West Africa used oral stories to remember and embed stories in minds of their people, and in oral histories

 

— In ancient Mesopotamia, cities had the challenge of growing food for growing civilization, so they built storage basins to optimally distribute water

 

— In India we can trace community designs with the codification of traditional plant knowledge and passing it through oral tradition, and embedding that knowledge within expert shamanistic healers

 

— Traditional systems of medicines typically institutionalized folk medicine that had existed for thousands of years beforehand

 

— There is no separation from participatory design from the history of communities
  • Even recent recoveries of knowledge of trees communicating with each other, and collective wisdom of plants, tie into this history of participatory design

 

— What is participatory design though? It’s typically called the same thing at different levels
  • Participatory Design
  • Co-Design
  • Co-Creation
  • Collaborative Design
  • Co-Participatory Design
  • Participatory Co-Design
  • Cooperative Design
  • Co-operative Design

 

— Participatory is also a way of doing a method, like bringing in community members for a study

 

— It’s also a methodology with principles that guide a particular method, or a way of doing things

 

— In all off these definitions though, a designer is centered, and is the main facilitator
  1. However, by this method we are empowering and reinforcing the hierarchy we seek to subvert, as we dictate the terms of participation
  • Facilitation is power. We know this when we are influencing outputs of one workshop to influence the inputs of workshop two

    This interpretation is happening without community members

  • It is in these in-between spaces that we wield power

 

— In radical participatory design, the designer becomes part of the community. Our skills that we offer, are equal to skills that other community members have
  • People know research and use design in how they live their lives, and we have something to learn from them
— Here we use community members as designer and facilitators as well

 

— In radical participatory design, community members are part of research and design team from beginning to end, and are always present & leading

 

— They also outnumber the professional designers

 

— They own the outcomes and artifacts and narratives around the artifacts

 

— So who participates, who initiates, who leads?
  • Community Design does it all
  • Community Driven Design may invite people who come in
  • Design Injustice, or regular participatory design, designers are fully in charge, and never reach co-leadership with the community

—However, community is always participating and leading with radical participatory design

 

— We are at the intersection of government and community needs
  • For those who aspire to democratic ideal, the needs of the people  should be aligned with government needs
— If not aligned, there is a problem in the system

 

— These systems can be designed in different direction

 

— So I will use two case studies to highlight benefits and ethics of radical participatory design
  1.  A case study in developing a digital literacy program at a multinational corporation, where previous projects had failed three times before
  2. In this space, the company gave up power and gave the community the ability to assume power
  3. Next, I will talk about redesign of the of an international summer service learning program, a project that didn’t achieve radically participatory design

 

— So what are the benefits of RPD?

 

— The first one is inclusive design, where the community members are the team, and groups can build on natural networks

 

— The second is human-centered design that  centers humans in every phase of the design process
  • And we need people from the community throughout the design process
— You then move from HCD to society-centered design

 

— Next we’ll talk about the benefit of empathy.  Now social workers will tell you empathy is an impossibility, as there are inherent power dynamics between social workers and clients
  • The same dynamics apply for designers and researchers
— Empathy is intellectual and knowing facts of experience
  • Emotional and compassionate empathy is harder to reach
— All empathies are components of empathy and we need all three

 

— But Victor, you say, I created a design, but we did it in context of a contractual relationship
  • But would we have been moved outside to act on it?
—Just embed empathy on your team, and people  will map their own empathies and personas

 

 

— For the fourth benefit, radical participatory design easily informs trauma responsive design
  • The components of a trauma informed approach are easily embedded in the team

 

— In our digital literacy initiative, the people on the team made it easier for us to implement our project

 

— For the fifth benefit, radical participatory design lets us move from a damage/problem based approached, to a desire-based design
  • It allows us to have a pluralistic version of the good life
— Pluriversal design lets you move to asset-based methodologies as people identify themselves by what they have to offer, not what they lack

 

— In our social entrepreneurship, students project did this by mapping out their future vision of the service program

 

— So how to do it ethically? And ethically does not just refer to confidentiality or data protection.

 

— Specifically there should be participant renumeration with equality and equity
  • With RPD the designer/researcher should be paid exact same as community member
  • Community members are giving up valuable time, while we are being paid to do our job
    • People should be paid more in recognition of this

 

— Our second case study involving the social entrepreneurship program failed this ethical criteria as people were paid nothing , and the impact of not being paid was greater on students who were involved with the design

 

— For the digital literacy case study, we came up with a plethora ways to compensate people
  • From providing them equipment
  • Letting them become authors on academic applications
  • Providing professional references for their work
  • Calling up prior members for feedback on upcoming projects

 

— Ask people what’s valuable to them, and they will provide you with resources

 

— Now let’s move to the question of how to evaluate a RPD process?

 

— This is not just the design outcome, but whether the process works
  • Ask yourselves: Have the majority of research/design team members experienced a sustainable and sustained shift in power?

 

— In the service program this didn’t work, as the non-profit didn’t own the outcomes of the design process
  • So the design process became a design future to implement later when the political will was there

 

— In the digital literacy project, team members leveraged experience, with participants becoming developers, project mangers, software developers

 

— So now let’s consider a scenario from a hypothetical future

 

— In 2052, US government has instituted participatory design in all agencies and cycling people from all walks of life in addressing the future of work
  • Here the government is radically ahead of private companies

 

— The government has issued a planet-centered value creation ensuring that private organizations practice radical participatory design

 

 

— But as companies increase adoption they develop a colonial design patten. This is not a future we’d want

 

— So if a certain future is desirable, what actions can we deploy to make a future more likely to happen?
  • I invite you to give up your power, and move forward into a better feature
Q&A
  1. How might we approach community-led design practically and logistically, and without taking advantage of folks’ time?
— I feel that by answering these questions, we start apart from the community
  • Let the community lead, as they will help you figure out goals and what the best way and logistics are
  • Tap into their cultural knowledge and lived experience
  1. I’m curious to know how we balance the need / hope for the community to take on the role of facilitator without placing or re-locating burden onto the community / individuals?
— What can happen is that community members sometimes aren’t ready, so we do a phased approach and model and provide help

 

— Shifts happen over time, to where community is doing the work, and we get a system in place to run itself
  1. Thinking a lot about how participatory design interfaces with public participation in the context of representative democracies… how do these two modes of public engagement complement, compete, contradict each other?
— I will give a few examples for participatory processes
  • Practices like asset mapping, participatory appraisals, appreciative interviews, time-banking, participatory budgeting, policy making
— There are ways to do this, and we need to recognize people are nervous to give up power and control
  • Even small steps can move things forward
— In the question of decisions by representatives versus people making it themselves
  • My personal opinion is lean into the community leading