Democratic design experiments: between parliament and laboratory

Abstract

For more than four decades, participatory design has provided exemplars and concepts for understanding the democratic potential of design participation. Despite important impacts on design methodology, participatory design has, however, been stuck in a marginal position as it has wrestled with what has been performed and accomplished in participatory practices. In this article, we discuss how participatory design may be reinvigorated as a design research programme for democratic design experiments in the light of the decentring of human-centredness and the foregrounding of collaborative representational practices offered by the ANT tradition in the tension between a parliament of things and a laboratory of circulating references.

Keywords::

• participation
• democracy
• experiment
• parliament
• laboratory
• thing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.