Participatory design and “democratizing innovation”

This paper builds on our previous readings as it is discussing the transformative path HCI has taken due to its interactions with other fields of study. Similar to our previous reading, by Kutti and Bannon (2014), the paper highlights that the idea that the success of HCI designs is nowadays reliant on designing ‘in the wild’. The paper calls for pushing the boundaries of participatory design to include the democratization of innovation. They also emphasized that this push is needed as technologies such as crowdsourcing have the potential to open the floodgates to participatory research.

That being said the term ‘democratizing innovation’ is open to interpretation. The authors explicitly stated that they are moving from the traditional understanding of democratic innovation (more people having more access to resources to create novel products) towards one that includes notions of social innovation. These notions include “radical change developing services, systems, and environments”. This framework for innovation seems to be on the rise as labs in several fields are being set up as permeable entities that welcome influences from the social context in which they are set up. An example of this is UNHCR’s new initiative UNHCR Ideas (https://www.unhcrideas.org/Page/Home) that allows any individual (with access to internet) to contribute to the development of innovations that would change UNHCR’s services.

 

The authors however failed to explicitly state their interpretation of democracy. It only becomes apparent when they discuss how rather than striving for negotiation models in their work with local communities their designs highlighted the areas of controversy within the community. They also indicated how their designs allowed for conflict to play out within the designs. The potential for designs to allow for the surfacing of controversial matters within communities that would otherwise remain salient gives added power to the concept of participatory design. This aligns with the agonistic pluralism concept of democracy that DiSalvo (2010) has indicated to be lacking in HCI designs.

In line with these views of participatory design, Malmo Living Labs works based on the concepts of Thinging and Infrastructuring. The idea of Thinging falls in line with creating social innovations and a space for controversies to constructively lead to designs. Infrastructuring was the more interesting concept that in my opinion allows for Thinging to take place; for it allows for the infrastructure and logistics of a project to be fluid enough to respond to the inductive process of Thinging. It was infrastructuring that made these projects faster paced and understandable to the stakeholders than previous projects they have participated in.

In conclusion the paper brings forth a new way of framing and developing the outputs we would want from participatory design in HCI.

The paper I found to have an interesting participatory design methodology is  titled “Making the Invisible Visible: Design to Support the Documentation of Participatory Arts Experiences” (DOI: 10.1145/2702123.2702187)

References

Kuutti, K., & Bannon, L. J. (2014, April). The turn to practice in HCI: Towards a research agenda. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 3543-3552). ACM.

DiSalvo, C. (2010, July). Design, democracy and agonistic pluralism. InProceedings of the design research society conference (pp. 366-371).