The Value of “Things”: A Review of “Participatory design and democratizing innovation”

In this paper, Björgvinsson, Ehn and Hildergren provide a summary of some of the initial progress of Malmö Living Labs – a place for social innovation which aims to conduct participatory design through a practice of “democratizing innovation”.

This phrase, like several other referenced concepts mentioned (“Triple Helix”, “lead users”…) is only explained through citations and not directly, which makes the paper difficult to read as it requires pre-existing knowledge or background reading to fully comprehend.

The group’s model of working revolves around a redefinition of the word “thing”, denoted as Thing, to mean “a socio-material assembly around a matter of concern”. By bringing together a variety of diverse stakeholders to explore a topic in an open, unconstrained manner, they allow new issues and ideas to evolve from the community itself in a bottom-up manner, rather than being pushed out by the researchers or simply using the community as a “focus group” to collect feedback. Instead, they establish long term relationships, enabling participants to “become co-creators”. They take their concept of Thing further into a process of  “public Thinging”  – though they never explicitly explain what that means.

I was unimpressed by the approach presented, as it is presented as something radical and innovative, yet their definition of Things as “temporary joint endeavours that are assembed, undone and reassembled depending on what is to achieved” is so general that it could describe just about any collaborative human endeavour.

The paper talks about two specific examples. In both cases, there seems to have been an effort to target under-represented groups to “make a difference” – though this is not stated explicitly. The first example was a collaborative exploration with RGRA – a grassroots hip-hop collective fomed of first and second generation immigrants. This resulted in at least three projects taking place – Barcode Beats, UrbLove and BluePromo.

The other case study in the paper is a collaboration with Herrgårds Women Association – a group of immigrant women living in a contentious suburb of Malmö – where one of the activities was the immigrant women cooking Afghan-Iranian food for newly arrived refugee orphans.

While largely exploratory and not designed with specific outputs in mind, Living Lab’s work did have some measurable impacts. Their involvement (and that of third parties) lent credibility to the organisations, such that during the study RGRA changed from an informal grassroots organisation to a formal organization applying for grants. A mobile gaming project they carried out with RGRA, UrbLove, produced re-usable tourist routes.

Another aspect of the Living Lab’s work was to create and enable “agonistic public spaces for innovation” by encouraging diverse parties to interact. An example of this friction was seen when the transport partner Veolia was found to have invested in East Jerusalem, seen by many Arabs to be Israeli-occupied Palestinian terrority. A compromise was found to enable both RGRA and Veolia to stay involved in the project but without direct contact.

In general, I found the paper quite unremarkable. It does have a few points of interest – as mentioned above – but the majority of its length is taken up with long, rambling explanations of the whys and wherefores of their work and of their model of thinking, that contribute no new understanding, insights or value to the reader. The paper is high on repetition, low on detail, and sparse on value. The only significant take-away from the paper is that we are encouraged to turn traditional participatory design thinking on its head by getting involved in communities to explore and uncover ideas rather than approaching the community with a specific idea or project in mind. In 2016, this seems completely obvious.

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The paper I have chosen as a “good example of involving people in a design process” is Participatory Research with Older Adults with AMD: Co-Designing a SMART Diet Diary App by Hakoban, Lumsden and O’Sullivan. I think this is a good example because:

• It targets a group that is normally not considered by software designers (elderly with visual disorders).
• By using paper materials, the participants can operate in a visual language they understand.
• The eventual application design (screen layout) arises directly from the participants’ design sessions, rather than being created by designers who used their participation as input, and rather than a design being presented to participants for feedback.