Structuring Future Social Relations: The Politics of Care in Participatory Practice by Light, A. & Akama, Y. (2014)

This paper describes how the scope of participatory design (PD) can – and should – move beyond a concern with merely involving people in designing products and systems towards the more ambitious arena of designing and (re)structuring social relationships. The authors acknowledge that this change in focus implies a series of political shifts and they draw upon feminist concepts of ‘care’ to examine how social relations were enabled or affected in three case studies.

The first example questioned how neighbourhoods themselves might tackle the problem of increased social isolation for older people. The second studied social relations in the context of fire-preparedness in an Australian community. The third looked at how learning and capacity building could be supported by enabling social activists to co-create learning platforms.

None of these case studies is intended to describe the design of products, systems or services that are used. Instead, the authors attempt to show that designing relations is a never-ending and reflexive process which spreads through encounter and exchange.

The authors argue that PD has always attempted to change social relations through design. They cite Greenbaum’s (1993) classification of three motivations for conducting PD: pragmatic – to improve design; theoretical – to argue and show the benefits of user-involvement in design; and political – to make workplaces and practices more democratic.

These days, rather than being restricted to the workplace, much of what is designed is ‘mobile, generic and networked, used variously across contexts that we, as designers and researchers, may never see’. This creates a dilemma for PD practitioners: they might only encounter the participants during the design phase of a project yet what is being designed continues to affect social relations long after the project has ended.

My reactions:

• My main concern was ‘isn’t this a bit like social engineering?’ so it was good to reach the discussion and see this question explicitly addressed! The authors argue that the participatory practitioner should be ‘especially careful to explore options for involving the people implicated in decisions affecting them’ but that dictating how social relations should be is neither desirable nor possible.
• I wondered about the potential harm projects like those in the case studies could do as well as the alleged benefits.
• Who would tend to be left out of these types of participatory exercises and to what extent is this a problem for the practitioner to address?
• I had difficulty understanding the conceptualisation of ‘care’ throughout this paper and the reference to participatory practitioners as ‘custodians of care’ struck me as patrician and potentially problematic – who made them custodians of care and why should we trust them to do it?
• I thought there was a lack of discussion of conflict or what happens when the people participating have very different agendas, needs or perspectives.
• I was sympathetic to the idea that participant involvement should be ongoing and not limited to ‘design phases’ or short term projects. However, if the design process, as it applies to relationships, is never-ending and diffuse and ‘spread through encounter and exchange’ then how can we separate the design process from just life being lived?

The paper I have chosen as a good example of involving people in the design process is this one. I chose this because I am interested in the practical, methodological and ethical challenges posed by attempting PD with people with ‘cognitive impairments’. I was also interested in the researchers’ use of techniques like storytelling and game playing.