The issue of participation is revitalised in design and design research, and a second generation of designers is taking up the challenge to open up the design process for engagements and dialogue with people outside the design community. Large companies deeply embedded in technological innovation employ anthropologists and designers to study future trends through an active involvement with people who may one day be future users. Young designers are playing with the opportunities to consciously allow for and encourage people to augment and change what was previously thought of as the finished design.
For the title of this special issue, we have chosen the plural: design participation(-s). With this we want to propose that the present interest in participation is diverse and multi-directional. It is driven by a genuine curiosity toward peoples' imaginative and intangible aspirations and motivations, making the issue of participation a concern for designers as such. In contemporary design participation(-s), participation is still about engaging multiple voices. But rather than thinking of this as attempts to design in concert with particular needs, we sense a more pluralistic ambition of making design practice a creative commons for ongoing change.
Within research communities, many design researchers are looking into how today's new tendencies towards participation may be supported through a re-thinking of the design process that re-casts ‘users' as co-creators.
Two transformational moves towards design participation(-s) began to emerge in the early 1970s: the early participatory design movement that began in Scandinavia and northern Europe, and the call from within the design research community to design for society and to include non-designers in design collaborations. Participatory design has its historical origins in a critique towards an approach to design that excluded the voices of most or all users and ignored many other stakeholders as well. An inspirational turning point in this critique was the Design Research Society's 1971 conference that called for design participation, as Sanders and Stappers discuss in this volume. The conference was both an attempt to put design in the service of societal needs and an indication of a maturing self-consciousness among designers who were ready to leave a traditional craft orientation in exchange for a modern repertoire of more openly transparent design methods. Sanders and Stappers offer an interesting mapping of the movements and currents from that time to now. They quote the 1971 talk by futurist Robert Jungk stating that it will take a generation for a design agenda of participation to address participation in idea generation. That turning point highlights how the fields of design and innovation are influenced by longer waves of change underlying the appearance of short-lived trends and fashions.
The emerging landscape of design portrayed by Sanders and Stappers is precisely one where an emphasis on collaborative idea generation and a turn towards designing for social purpose are reshaping both our notion of design and how we regard users. As they see it, design practice must change towards the nurturing of collective creativity in which the people we are accustomed to calling ‘users' should rather be seen as active and competent participants in design practice. As design and design research are becoming more closely integrated, participatory ideation at ‘the fuzzy front end’ of design is growing in importance. The new roles for designers and design researchers demand both a closer attention to different levels of creativity and a mastery of hybrid domains that traverse designer and researcher competencies as well as space and time.
Tracing developments since the early calls for participation, we can see that within some fields such as urban planning, computer systems design and informatics, participatory approaches gained important results, both in terms of novel designs and in terms of new political and juridical regulations of planning processes. Scandinavian participatory design began with a democratic agenda in which new computer technologies seemed ideally suited for political negotiation of their full specification and influence in society. Looking back on the debates from the 1970s through the 1980s, however, we can see that the strength of the participatory agenda weakened as the claims of the methods movement to enable designers to serve any need narrowed the initial call for inclusive multi-party participation in shaping design decisions into a political quest for influence on design specifications. What eventually made participatory design successful within computer systems design was the involvement of workers in early ‘technology projects’ concerned with office automation and machine shop programming that revealed that ‘specification’ was far from straightforward. The skills of users could not be easily explicated or codified and rather than a negotiation of specifications, systems development came more and more to look like a genuine design discipline.
Cooperative design and participatory prototyping became strong approaches for systems design to develop workable and innovative solutions that brought future users into design. This heritage of designing for skill and work practices in context still has much to offer. It effected a reorientation of how relations between design and use were conceived. Instead of artificial intelligence, we got situated action and instead of a model of the designer as rationale planner, we got the designer as reflective practitioner.
Brodersen, Dindler and Iversen highlight how the interest in participation today stems from a new openness towards what can be designed. They are especially concerned with how design participation(-s) can be staged to release creative cooperation in design tasks and goals. Strongly oriented towards transcending the well-known in everyday practice, they propose new means to redress the balancing of tradition and transcendence originally posited in participatory design to moderate the overly ambitious attempts of designers to work from a clean slate. Brodersen etal. argue that ‘participatory prototyping can benefit from unfolding in imaginative places that are radically distant from the places of current practice’. At the same time, they maintain that committed design dialogues presuppose careful staging of imaginative places that bring together anchoring elements with elements of transcendence that afford new kinds of imaginative hybrid spaces for design cooperation. In a re-appreciation of how participatory design takes place, they show how the deliberate staging of imaginative places can suspend belief far more radically and thereby move prototyping into new realms.
The claim often heard in the debate of the 1990s that users are unable to contribute to the design of new technologies with which they are not familiar seems now widely to be turned on its head. Today many companies and researchers question how successful design can be made without exploring people's everyday practices and aspirations and, ultimately, involving the people for whom designs are intended. Lee responds to this backdrop when she advocates a return to the notion of design participation tactics rather than participatory design. With a background in architecture, Lee reports on three participatory projects, ranging from one-to-one engagement with private clients to collaboration with tenant groups seeking a say in large-scale housing projects to novel attempts to redefine participation and engagement in shaping public campaigns. For Lee, the notion of participatory design echoes the ambitions of designer-led control of the design process. As an alternative, she proposes a commitment to tactics that may eventually lead to a redefinition of designers' roles towards acting as developers, facilitators and generators.
The last two articles in this special issue discuss different aspects of participation in open design dialogues. Brandt, Messeter and Binder discuss design games as an interesting format for such design dialogues. The notion of design games is not new to participatory design, but Brandt etal. argue that when the deep parallels between design and play are better understood, game design can guide and sustain the collaborative exploration of design representations whether in the form of narratives or diagrams. To Brandt etal., gaming and board games in particular are genres that designers can work with and refine through the crafting of rules and game materials. Design games become micro-worlds for design dialogues, where playfulness is not only an attractive side-feature but an indication that the dialogues motivate participants to play with ‘what could be’.
In the last article, Mattelmäki revisits her work with empathy probes to see how the crafting of probing kits invite after-thought and also expose aspirations within the design team. In her review of how others have been appropriating the notion of probing in user research, Mattelmäki points to the risk that these dialogues are reduced to data collection or inspirational material. In a retrospective account of how she and her colleagues have worked with empathy probes, Mattelmäki emphasises how working with probing kits can be the starting point for a chain of participations involving many stakeholders.
This special issue highlights how vivid the issue of participation is in today's design discourse and thereby invites new questions towards our understanding of design and designer. New approaches are suggested and links to previous debates are reconsidered. One thread that runs across the contributions is the concern for the changing role of the designer as modes of design participation(-s) continue to expand. We find it promising that whatever the future role of a designer will be, it seems that it will be a role of participation rather than one of command and control.
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