Making and negotiating value: design and collaboration with community led groups

ABSTRACT

Value in collaborative design research and practice can be understood fundamentally as relationships, materials, processes, contexts, and outcomes that are subjects of and for negotiation. We argue for conceptions of value that move beyond traditional ‘outcomes’ based measurements to reimagine and rearticulate value itself as co-created, emerging from negotiation, relationality and immersion in specific contexts. These understandings of value, we argue, are not rooted in or always knowable through designers’ experiences, even as designers participate in creating them. Using case studies from our research we suggest that value in design collaboration emerges as a question: value to whom, and to what end? We propose that addressing these questions ethically through co-design requires actively engaged, grounded work with collaborators based in three principles: being present for the work, participant making, and co-creating capacity for collaborators to ‘go off and do their thing’.

KEYWORDS:

• Social justice and design
• anthropology
• service design
• education
• Haiti
• New York City

Acknowledgments

The authors thank our collaborators: Lekòl Kominote Matènwa, Chris Low and Casey Anderson; Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, Fortune Society teachers Ayesha Hoda and John Kafalas, WHEELS teacher Kerry MacNeil, and the students at WHEELS, Fortune, and Parsons / The New School, whose names are too many to list here, but were so much a driving force in this work (and many of whom talk about the project on the Working with People website). We would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers whose careful reading and feedback improved this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Elizabeth’s research was supported by a Samsung Faculty Research Grant from ArtCenter College of Design. The Ship’s First Shape Was a Raft was supported through a New School Collaboratory Grant, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.