The Politics of Care in Participatory Practice by Ann Light and Yoko Akama, 2014

This paper [1] explores the fundamental question of the role of the designer and their duty of care upon the end user(s) in participatory design (PD) practice. Light and Akama argue that PD practice is normally preoccupied with the role of the designer and the participants in the process of “making”.

Attempting to broaden the conceptual, political and ethical scope of PD practice, they argue that the role of the designer does not simply stop at this, and instead the designer should consider their contribution to the ongoing evolution of personal and community social relations initiated by participation. They construct this argument with reference to the historical foundations of PD in the workplace as an explicit political practice with a social justice trajectory. They also situate their argument within a feminist perspective that asserts the fostering of care is integral in creating an experience of life that is ‘liveable’, the consequence for designers being an ‘obligation to provide people with the opportunity to influence their own lives’ (Greenbaum, 1993: 47).

One case study that suggests the direction of travel that the authors are seeking is the Stimulating Participation in the Informal Creative Economy project. The project involved participants putting themselves forward from creative and community domains to begin imagining and “shaping” the future of their local community through self-initiated activities and cross-communication between four geographically distinct study areas. It was hoped that their actions would inspire others to think about how they could begin to shape (and perhaps “care for”) the places around them. The activities helped develop a more nuanced understanding of local issues, a greater appreciation of the places around them and how they could actively influence its shaping whilst being actively constituted by it.

It is clear in this particular project that there was a high level of co-production and limited opportunity for practitioners to exert their values upon the outcomes. However, in concluding their argument, the authors ultimately call for practitioners (as ‘custodians of care’) to ‘create spaces for others to reflect, make mistakes, learn and debate’. So this paper reveals a key theoretical contention within PD practice – how are designers supposed to design without exerting any influence over the outcomes? Is it at all possible for design to be fully participatory – or would it then not be design at all? Care giving is reliant upon one exerting influence over another, but who decides who is giving care, and on what terms this care is delivered? And what about the people who will not be involved, through a lack of skills, confidence or through their own choosing?

The authors make a number of assumptions about care – that care-givers are always acting benevolently, and that there is a latent body of care-subjects that are willing, able and ready to engage at the designer’s whim.  This paper, whilst emphasising that care can be constituted from the “bottom-up”, reminds us of the procedural and ethical challenge of diverging from interventionism. Indeed, the very practice of land use planning, healthcare, education and other core functions of civic bodies is based upon a practice of care-giving, manifested by interventions delivered by “expert” practitioners. How PD practitioners break from the trap of “caring for” to realise a state of “caring by” is a theoretical conundrum that could extend well beyond the enforced word limit of this blog post….

 

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I felt like it was important to bring to the next discussion one of the seminal works on participation: Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation was written in 1969 but still carries significance today through continued citations in participation research. It places eight different levels of participation (from manipulation to citizen control) on a ladder, providing case studies of public projects to explore the feasible limits of each.

[1] Light A. and Akama Y. (2014), Structuring Future Social Relations: The Politics of Care in Participatory Practice, Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers – Volume 1 (PDC ’14), October 2014: 151-160.

[2] Greenbaum, J (1993), “PD: A personal statement”, CACM.

[3] Arnstein, S. (1969), A Ladder Of Citizen Participation, Journal of the American Institute of Planners. 35 (4): 216.