Quasi-Quisling: co-design and the assembly of collaborateurs

In recent years, various critiques of participative approaches to design processes have been presented. Participatory urban planning has been subject to a specific form of criticism, which posits that such processes are ‘post-political’, inasmuch as they merely legitimise the power and political agendas of elites. In reviewing a case of participatory urban planning in Gothenburg, Sweden, this article suggests that actor-network theory can be operationalised as an alternative means to account for democratic deficiencies of co-design practices. It thus uses the concept of translation to describe how the original interests of participants may be betrayed, as successive translations cause objectives to drift. It also suggests that the key agency in these unfortunate betrayals is not human, but emerges through the material modes of collaboration. The article thus endeavours to contribute to the debate on how co-design processes may become more effective means to democratise urban planning and design.     

Co-designing health promotion at a science centre: distributing expertise and granting modes of participation

Abstract

Museums and science centres are increasingly employing participatory approaches to exhibition design. Despite the increasing interest, the dynamics, challenges and benefits of employing participatory methods in museum design remain under-researched. Ensuring that audiences are involved requires reflections on the aim of the participation, and on the implications of its practical and institutional embeddedness. We analyse how co-design frames the meeting between disciplinary fields, as well as achieving audience involvement, through the case of the PULSE project. Here, designers, researchers, and families co-designed a health-promoting exhibition at a Danish science centre. We investigate how the co-design process was shaped between the fields of health promotion research and exhibition design practice. We describe how audiences and professionals were redefined and repositioned, and how tensions arose and necessitated negotiations of expertise, authority and modes of participation. The ideal of visitor involvement created tensions with existing design and development practices complicating the translation of user experience into exhibition design.     

Notes on ANT for designers: ontological,methodological and epistemological turn in collaborative design

This article aims to explore how ANT might help us to rethink collaborative and participatory design (C&PD) practices through converting Bruno Latour's call for risky accounts to a call for design things together. What if ANT starts to be in the business of designing new pieces of technology and not just actor-network accounts of them? What would the design process and its outcomes look like? In response to these questions and to the challenge of co-habitation as vital condition for our technical democracy, I propose three turns in C&PDs. The first is ontological and suggests to design actor networks and to look for ways to make these networks visible. The second is methodological and suggests reimagining co-design as actor networking in public, aided by a much-needed cartography of design. The last is epistemological: it is concerned with what knowledge should inform action in the design process, and it proposes to the idea of the designer as an agnostic Prometheus.     

Visualising things. Perspectives on how to make things public through visualisation

In this paper, we will be discussing how visualisations can facilitate participatory processes by way of conveying issues of public concern as ‘things’. In the line of Latour’s plea to ‘make things public’, visualisations can be purposefully designed to trigger and encourage public debates concerning a wide range of issues. For this, we explore how a visualisation can be both transparent (i.e. visualising the complex entanglement of backstories of an issue) and readable. Specifically, we clarify the aspect of designing a readable visualisation of ‘things’. First, drawing from different fields of literature (i.e. Information Visualisation, Science and Technology Studies and Human-Computer-Interaction) we will articulate three main aspects of readability: engaging people to interact with a visualisation of complex issues, supporting sense making and encouraging reflection. Then, based on three empirical case studies, we indicate different design considerations in terms of engaging people to interact with a visualisation: contextualising a visualisation (via its location or medium), staging interaction and allowing people to provide their own perspective on the issue displayed. As a conclusion we propose a scenario that allows the visualisation to gradually become more transparent in support of its readability.     

Democratic design experiments in urban planning – navigational practices and compositionist design

In the field of urban planning, public participation and inclusion of citizens have been practised and researched for many years. However, a focus on co-creative urban planning practices seems to have gained more focus over the last decade and calls for new urban planning practices, which allow experimentation and imagination, and at the same time take its outset in the existing networks in the city (such as visions, strategies, regulations and practices) when planning for the future. In this article, we investigate how a compositionist design programme can be translated into the practices of urban planners. We find that the notion of ‘democratic design experiments’ in many ways meet the demands of the increasingly complex field of urban planning and set out to explore how such a design programme can be applied in practice. We suggest ‘navigational practice’ as a way of describing how urban planners deal with ‘drawing things together’ in urban space and introduce ‘sensitivity’, ‘staging’ and ‘mobilization’ as interconnected elements of this practice. We exemplify the significance of these navigational practices by analysing two democratic design experiments in the area of urban waste management in Copenhagen. The article concludes that compositionist design is a powerful contribution to the framing of urban planning projects and that navigational practice can be a productive way of operationalising democratic design experiments in the urban context.     

Sizing up ‘the box’ in order to fit in

Participants in design processes make an effort to come up with solutions that will be deemed acceptable, while accomplishing to ‘think out of the box’. Thinking ‘outside the box’ is often announced as a challenge to and for design teams. ‘The box’ is a metaphor often used in creative processes, and in organisational practices, as a term for rules and regulations, everyday routines and tacit knowledge of ‘how things usually are’ and ‘what we know about the world’. Such a challenge is meant to encourage participants to approach a situation with an open mind, challenge the most basic assumptions and be willing to do things differently. Basically, something different is being called for. Studies have shown that it is striking, how much the participants orient to actually ‘fit’ the box, even when asked to develop it. This paper shows how participants in design processes are ‘sizing up the box’, while participating in meetings or workshops in order to develop a design. They identify key stakeholders of the designated design project; they share their own expectations of these key stakeholders' possible perceptions, discuss the success criteria and negotiate the values that are to govern the design team in the development process.     

Co-designing reform-based online inquiry learning environments as a situated approach to teachers’ professional development

This study examined the contribution of a co-design approach to science teachers’ situated professional development, and explored its effect on student learning and motivation. Study participants were three science teachers who were members of a co-design team; one of the teachers enacted the designed learning environment with her 11th grade, non-science major students. Data were collected from 31 design meetings over two years, teacher interviews, and from pre-post student learning and motivation assessments. Findings indicated that the co-design approach addressed teachers’ reform-based professional development needs, had greater impact on the enacting teacher, and met the enacting students’ learning and motivation needs. The findings talk to the potential of co-design as a successful approach for teachers’ reform-based, situated professional development.     

Co-operative design of children'sinteraction in museums: a case studyin the Hunt Museum

This paper reports research conducted in collaboration with the Hunt Museum, Limerick, Ireland, which examined how children's interaction in museums could be augmented through co-operative design. The paper describes the participatory design process that was undertaken over a two-year period, involving key informants and stakeholders, including teachers, docents (specialist museum guides) and curators. The designers also explored the potential of ubiquitous computing to enhance children's interpretive experience in museums, and this is also described. The research reported in this paper was supported within the EU disappearing computer (DC) initiative, specifically the SHAPE project. The goal of SHAPE, Situating Hybrid Assemblies in Public Environments, was to explore how emerging, novel computer technologies could be deployed in public spaces to enhance interaction and learning. The project culminated in the deployment of an innovative, large-scale computer-augmented exhibition, Re-Tracing the Past, in the Hunt Museum. This novel exhibition was open to the public from 9 to 19 June 2003. This paper documents the design process from initial scenario elaboration through to final deployment of novel technology in the museum. Evaluation data are also discussed, and the paper concludes with some insights for participatory design of technology to enhance children's interaction in museums. Furthermore, the review of evaluation data illustrates how the design themes that informed the extensive design process were successfully embodied in the final exhibition in the museum.     

Telling tales: using stories to remake energy policy

To benefit and protect the populace, government policies often promise aspirational changes to current practice. Different kinds of narratives are important in the framing, explanation, motivation, and understanding of policies and strategies. For example, the UK government's 2008 Climate Change Act proclaimed that all new homes will be zero carbon by 2016. This ‘hero story’, where society is ‘saved’ by clever technologies, is inspiring, positive and familiar. An alternative is the ‘learning story’, where things are not quite as simple as they first seemed. In a learning story, protagonists are normal people who need to overcome a challenge. In energy policy, the learning story could address the gap between the technical potential and what is achieved in practice. Three real-world examples from retrofit and new-build projects are used to show how implicit narratives can create conflict when the tellers (e.g. researchers) have to tell one kind of story but have data for the other. Recommendations are provided for a balanced approach to the deployment of different kinds of tales by policy-makers, researchers, implementers and users. Harnessing the learning story and developing a ‘caring story’ could motivate policy-makers and the public to invest effort in building performance.     

How was it for you? Experiences of participatory design in the UK health service

Improving co-design methods implies that we need to understand those methods, paying attention to not only the effect of method choices on design outcomes, but also how methods affect the people involved in co-design. In this article, we explore participants' experiences from a year-long participatory health service design project to develop ‘Better Outpatient Services for Older People’. The project followed a defined method called experience-based design (EBD), which represented the state of the art in participatory service design within the UK National Health Service. A sample of participants in the project took part in semi-structured interviews reflecting on their involvement in and their feelings about the project. Our findings suggest that the EBD method that we employed was successful in establishing positive working relationships among the different groups of stakeholders (staff, patients, carers, advocates and design researchers), although conflicts remained throughout the project. Participants' experiences highlighted issues of wider relevance in such participatory design: cost versus benefit, sense of project momentum, locus of control, and assumptions about how change takes place in a complex environment. We propose tactics for dealing with these issues that inform the future development of techniques in user-centred healthcare design.     

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’.     

Figurations of spatiality and temporality in participatory design and after – networks,meshworks and patchworking

In recent years, many have combined actor–network theory (and after) and collective design. In this emerging field that we call participatory design and after, many have proposed and appropriated figurations such as networks, fluid, fire, thing and meshwork. In this paper, we argue that figurations do not only contribute to knowing the world, they also intervene in the becoming of worlds. This recognition of the performative character of figuration suggests that knowledge-making and world-making are inseparable, and makes it very important to be careful what figurations we imagine, articulate and use. In order to continue the work done in ANT and collective design that focuses on uncertainties, boundary-making, complexities and time, we propose the figuration of patchworking. What we particularly find generative with the figuration of patchworking is that it figures design as entanglements in multiple temporalities. Through the figuration of patchworking, we offer an approach that allows for understanding and working with multiple and overlapping collectives. This means to refigure how and where to draw the boundaries of co-designing in technological societies.     

Analysing design suggestions and use of resources in co-design of educational software: A case study

This naturalistic study focuses on how the co-design of educational software is an activity mediated by and through communicative resources. The aim is to identify how design suggestions and the use of resources emerge in co-design. This study contributes to the growing interest in understanding aspects of collaboration in design. To understand the phenomenon of collaboration in design, we apply interaction analysis, dialogism and the sociocultural perspective to show which resources the participants use and how they negotiate design suggestions. We argue that such understanding is only visible through detailed analysis of naturally occurring co-design activities. We find that the design trajectory varies in how the participants orient themselves to each other and in relation to the design artefacts. Tensions make visible which communicative resources are sensitive to what the participants interpret as relevant in the context of their institutional norms and values. Their different positions must be negotiated. Together, these aspects orient the design and mediate the emerging consensus and design artefact.     

Fortifying futures: how older boomerangers in English multigenerational households boost resilience through social capital accumulation and distribution

Abstract

Multigenerational households (MGHs) are the UK’s fastest growing household type. This paper critically explores the relative influence of ‘Generation X’ in shaping social capital accumulation and distribution strategies within English MGHs. We contend that this cohort, described here as ‘amalgamation generation’, (older ‘boomerangers’) recognize how the quintessential inter/intra generational forms of social capital present in MGHs may be consolidated to boost resilience at a time of economic uncertainty and social instability. We challenge therefore the largely negative discourse surrounding boomerangers which exist in existing scholarship. Our analysis highlights the dialectical relationship between the concepts of resilience and social capital when applied to multigenerational living. In doing so, we highlight the relevance of network centrality, shared family values, an awareness of the natural life cycle and the importance of family ‘social capital bank’ in promoting the overall cohesion of the MGH. The extent to which English MGHs may be construed as a liquid, temporal and fluid asset over space, place and time is explored.     

Democratic design experiments: between parliament and laboratory

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.     

Designing hybrid places: merging interaction design,ubiquitous technologies and geographies of the museum space

In this paper we discuss how geographical notions of space and place can aid designers in creating meaningful interactions between end users and technologically augmented physical spaces—specifically museums. We review the literature that discusses the use of spatial concepts and metaphors within the interaction design field and discuss several examples of interactive museum installations. We then describe how we have incorporated our understanding of place and human experience into the design and development of a hybrid museum space: an interactive exhibition entitled ‘Re-Tracing the Past’ at the Hunt Museum in Limerick, Ireland.     

‘Fourth places’: the contemporary public settings for informal social interaction among strangers

This paper introduces ‘fourth places’ as an additional category of informal social settings alongside ‘third places’. Through extensive empirical fieldwork on where and how social interaction among strangers occurs in the public and semi-public spaces of a contemporary masterplanned neighbourhood, this paper reveals that ‘fourth places’ are closely related to ‘third places’ in terms of social and behavioural characteristics, involving a radical departure from the routines of home and work, inclusivity and social comfort. However, the activities, users, locations and spatial conditions that support them are very different. They are characterized by ‘in-betweenness’ in terms of spaces, activities, time and management, as well as a great sense of publicness. This paper will demonstrate that the latter conditions are effective in breaking the ‘placelessness’ and ‘fortress’ designs of newly designed urban public spaces and that, by doing so, they make ‘fourth places’ sociologically more open in order to bring strangers together. The recognition of these findings problematizes well-established urban design theories and redefines several spatial concepts for designing public space. Ultimately, the findings also bring optimism to urban design practice, offering new insights into how to design more lively and inclusive public spaces.     

The smart city and its publics: insights from across six UK cities

In response to policy-makers’ increasing claims to prioritise ‘people’ in smart city development, we explore the publicness of emerging practices across six UK cities: Bristol, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, and Peterborough. Local smart city programmes are analysed as techno-public assemblages invoking variegated modalities of publicness. Our findings challenge the dystopian speculative critiques of the smart city, while nevertheless indicating the dominance of ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘service user’ modes of the public. We highlight the risk of bifurcation within smart city assemblages, such that the ‘civic’ and ‘political’ roles of the public become siloed into less obdurate strands of programmatic activity.     

Co-designing for common values: creating hybrid spaces to nurture autonomous cooperation

ABSTRACT

The paper concerns the development of digitally-mediated technologies that value social cooperation as a common good rather than as a source of revenue and accumulation. The paper discusses the activities that shaped a European participatory design project which aims to develop a digital space that promotes and facilitates the ‘Commonfare’, a complementary approach to social welfare. The paper provides and discusses concrete examples of design artifacts to address a key question about the role of co- and participatory design in developing hybrid spaces that nurture sharing and autonomous cooperation: how can co-design practices promote alternatives to the commodification of digitally-mediated cooperation? The paper argues for a need to focus on relational, social, political and ethical values, and highlights the potential power of co- and participatory design processes to achieve this. In summary, the paper proposes that only by re-asserting the centrality of shared values and capacities, rather than individual needs or problems, co-design can reposition itself thereby encouraging autonomous cooperation.