Participatory design and democratizing innovation
The paper Participatory design and democratizing innovation by Bjorgvinsson, Ehn and Hillgren (2010) was quite fascinating for me personally.
The authors introduce a new explanation for the concept of “Thing as a socio-material assembly that deals with matters of concern” rather than an object or service. This definition is used to advance the idea that participatory design shifted from designing with static/well defined users towards “new milieus” such as open spaces instead of being confined in closed spaces. The paper aims to answer the research question: “Is there a research perspective on democratizing innovation more in line with the values that once guided participatory design?” Thus, in order to tackle this question, the authors dwell on 2 experiences of Malmö Living Labs; a participatory design and innovation milieu to explore the concept of “democratizing innovation”.
The 2 experiences described by the authors take place in Malmö a dynamic multi-ethnic city as the authors describe it. First, the RGRA was approached; a grassroots hip-hop organization for immigrant youth. This collaboration intended to enhance the presence of those youth in both urban and media landscapes. I find the way this was achieved very interesting because it went beyond traditional media tools. Using the barcode beats instrument (having hip-hop loops resonating as result of scanning barcodes) is quite innovative because it wasn’t being done in a space created by the researchers, the implementation was in a grocery store implying that unorthodox spaces such as commercial stores could become spaces for creativity and design. The second idea with RGRA was to have Bluetooth poles on buses transformed as such into media providers. This space is considered a new space where youth were able to distribute their music and become visible in the city. The third idea executed with RGRA in collaboration with a game company was to create a game path through which participants would explore the neighborhoods where RGRA youth reside and are perceived as dangerous by the rest of Malmö’s residents. This idea in particular makes me think of my home city Beirut, as many underprivileged youth, mainly non-Lebanese reside in neighborhoods (referred to as camps sometimes) that are perceived as dangerous by other residents of Beirut. Having a similar idea implemented in that context could be exciting, yet my concern would be that in some of this neighborhoods, some political parties would not appreciate the fact that outsiders actually wander inside of these due to security reasons. The second collaboration was with HWA (an association for marginalized women from diverse nationalities) with the aim to explore how the skills of these women can be acknowledged by the Swedish society who has excluded them. Through the health care company Attendo, women cook homemade meals and give advice for orphan refugee children. This initiative brought together two marginalized groups who benefited from each other; women felt they were using their skills for a good cause and the children were receiving meals and communicating in an environment which reminds them of their home countries. Based on this experience, women could expand it to have their own catering service for companies and hence it would be an income generating activity.
Through these examples, the authors illustrate the concept of participatory innovation Things, where agonistic public spaces are formed as a way to “democratizing innovation”. In other words, spaces as those mentioned bring together various voices and make them heard despite the struggle of hegemony.
However, the authors clearly mention the challenges encountered in both collaborations. For RGRA, it was related to the bus company selected due to its work in occupied Palestine. For HWA, the women subject to cultural norms, can’t become the providers of their households as it defies the role of their husbands and having catering services would raise issues with trade union as they would be competing with other providers under unfair conditions. As for the orphan refugee children they had higher expectations while authorities made it clear to organizers that those children are in transit status and will probably be relocated to other cities of Sweden and thus it would be pointless to expand the relation with them. As such “democratizing innovation” brings with it a new set of challenges and dealing with those isn’t always evident as it would entail changes at a higher level.
In addition, the authors state that the Malmö lab was actually driven by consensus and did not really account for the existing hegemony and state the example of the bus company with which they did not discuss its work. I believe as restated by the authors later on that just by creating new spaces for new possibilities, opening up new provoking questions, one would be moving towards the democratization of innovation; where antagonism is constructively transformed to agonism. In conclusion, the most interesting aspect for me is the idea of “democratic innovation” practices “on the go” as described by the authors where the collaboration isn’t as structured as it is conventionally and the connections that were built were sustainable such as the example of RGRA which expanded its collaboration with the Bluetooth company. The idea of sharing control of a project tackled by Vines et al. (CHI, 2013) is very clear in these examples, since both RGRA and HWA were engaged in all processes, gained new insights and networks while researchers were supporting in the “infrastructuring of the spaces” and overseeing the process without imposing their own views.
References
Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., & Hillgren, P. A. (2010, November). Participatory design and democratizing innovation. In Proceedings of the 11th Biennial participatory design conference (pp. 41-50). ACM.
Vines, J., Clarke, R., Wright, P., McCarthy, J., & Olivier, P. (2013, April). Configuring participation: on how we involve people in design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 429-438). ACM.
The paper I selected to exemplify participatory design is:
Uzor, S., Baillie, L., & Skelton, D. (2012, May). Senior designers: empowering seniors to design enjoyable falls rehabilitation tools. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1179-1188). ACM.
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