Should we care? Review of ‘Structuring future social relations: the politics of care in participatory practice’

Looking back at Participatory Design — in its historical context, Light and Akama’s paper suggests that its main motives were along the lines of redesigning social structure and empowering the workforce. Taking things forward calls for changes in the design process, as the paper argues; moving from a traditional goal oriented scope where participation is limited to the lifetime of a project to a scheme where the co-designing of long term social relationships is the ultimate objective.

To define the role of designers in PD, the paper draws upon the feminist concept of care and the notion that for life to be livable, people have to care for each other. Hence, a designer is a ‘custodian of care’, setting to create the space for people to reflect, interact, and design, which could eventually lead to restructuring the power relations from a ‘top-down’ approach to one that engages the community making it more interdependent.

To demonstrate the participatory structuring of social relations, three case studies are examined, drawn from the authors’ own work. The studies tackled issues of social isolation in old age, social relations in surviving and preparing in case of fires, and involving people in ‘place-shaping’ activities to improve building capacity. Reflecting on the case studies, a common result of each was the development of mutual care and the scalability of the resulting participatory practice. Revisiting the concept of care and the ethics of it, the paper concludes with an idea to keep in mind, that ‘we are constantly designed by our own designing’.

The proposal here, simply stated, is to cease designing with people’s participation, but to simply create opportunities for people to build relations that somehow solve the problem, or otherwise enable them to find better solutions and hopefully maintain this. The designer, in this view, ‘intervenes from within’ to get people into solving the problem, or designing the solution. This, as paper claims, is not social engineering because it’s not deterministic, and not intended to create a very specific outcome. Though one wonders how this fits with assigning the designers, later on in the paper, as ‘custodians of care’.

While I may have opened this last paragraph with “simply stated”, the paper’s language didn’t lean much towards simplicity. It was not an easy read, to put it lightly. I found the suggestions of this paper to be quite interesting, but its presentation is single-sided, with little or no mention of what drawbacks or counter-arguments one could think up.

Literature

Light, A. and Akama, Y., 2014, October. Structuring future social relations: the politics of care in participatory practice. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers-Volume 1 (pp. 151-160). ACM.

 

A paper that I think is a good example of involving people in the design process is:

Müller, C., Hornung, D., Hamm, T. and Wulf, V., 2015, April. Practice-based Design of a Neighborhood Portal: Focusing on Elderly Tenants in a City Quarter Living Lab. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2295-2304). ACM.