PDC 2020’s theme is “Participation(s) otherwise”

Since Participatory Design’s (PD) emergence as a research community, PD scholars have asserted that design is a practical, social and political endeavour. Main commitments include: offering alternative technologies, rendering design processes democratic, open and accessible to wide participation, and amenable to critical scrutiny and mutual learning. By proposing the theme of Participation(s) otherwise, we want to invite the PD community to think further on the diverse meanings and ontologies that participation and design can take on. Let’s open up the understanding of “participation” beyond modernist narratives and theoretically “universal” cookie cutter solutions and account for diverse practices.

What forms, conceptions and understandings of participation, collaboration, intervention, design and technology can we draw upon to contest essentialist views on participatory design? Are current conceptions coherent with plural understandings and realities? What haven’t we realized before? From whom else are we / can we be learning?

Submissions may address one or more of the following anchor points. These should not be considered as mandatory, but rather indicative of things we believe require urgent action:

• • • Local/global – place/territory: Explorations of place, space, materiality, and temporality within participatory design and for technologies otherwise.

    • Economies: Inquiries into the role and scope of participatory design in the critique, reinterpretation and construction of green, circular, open, commons and solidarity processes. This includes also provocative reflections on participatory design processes themselves, understood as a process of exchange.

    • Representation, resistance and governance otherwise: The potential of participatory design practices to support (or undermine) forms of civic participation, power redistribution and conflict negotiation, to challenge authoritarianism, or explore horizontal ways of organising. Including making alternative (or resistive) technologies, spaces, systems, processes or infrastructures.

    • Design Research:Explorations of new forms of making otherwise and methodological innovations for design as participatory political praxis (including decolonial, feminist, and collective research and action approaches). Reflections on how those can transform scientific writing to be more representative of collaborative knowledge construction processes.

    • Participation and Interculturality: Spaces and features of (and for) dialogue) and design that avoid universalism and include critical perspectives towards collaboration, co-creation, and the role of technology in these processes.

We welcome a variety of different contributions, such as theoretical elaborations, case study analysis, long term explorations and/or methodological reflections. Check the submission categories and decide which format fits your work better: