Eva Brandt

Democratic design experiments: between parliament and laboratory

For more than four decades, participatory design has provided exemplars and concepts for understanding the democratic potential of design participation. Despite important impacts on design methodology, participatory design has, however, been stuck in a marginal position as it has wrestled with what has been performed and accomplished in participatory practices. In this article, we discuss how participatory design may be reinvigorated as a design research programme for democratic design experiments in the light of the decentring of human-centredness and the foregrounding of collaborative representational practices offered by the ANT tradition in the tension between a parliament of things and a laboratory of circulating references.

Taking design games seriously: re-connecting situated power relations of people and materials

Using design games at Participatory Design (PD) events is well acknowledged as a fruitful way of staging participation. As PD researchers, we have many such experiences, and we have argued that design games connect participants and promote equalizing power relations. However, in this paper, we will (self) critically re-connect and reflect on how people (humans) and materials (non-humans) continually participate and intertwine in various power relations in design game situations. The analysis is of detailed situated actions with one of our recent games, UrbanTransition. Core concepts mainly from Bruno Latours work on Actor-Network-Theory are applied. The aim is to take design games seriously by e.g. exploring how assemblages of humans and non-humans are intertwined in tacitly-but-tactically staging participation, and opening up for or hindering negotiations and decision-making, thus starting to relate research on various PD techniques and power issues more directly.

Writing participatory design: a workshop on interpreting, accounting and novel forms of reporting

This workshop asks participatory designers and researchers to consider how they write about their work and what role there is for novel approaches to expression, forms drawn from other disciplines, and open and playful texts. As we bring social science and humanities sensibilities to bear on designing with others; as we conduct experiments in infrastructuring and sociotechnical assemblages; as we ask what participation means in different contexts and types of futuring, can we find voice to match our innovations? How do reflexivity, positionality, autobiography and auto-ethnography fit into our reflections on designing? How far are we making our practice even as we write? Is the page a contemplative or collaborative space? Does the tyranny of the conference paper overwrite everything? Join us for this day of reading, writing and discussion about how we tell the stories that matter most to us.

Social innovation within prison service

This paper report on a project in a maximum-security prison in Denmark, where a group of officers and inmates engaged in a participatory design project aimed at improving the quality of everyday life. A series of participatory design workshops had two overall objectives: 1) to increase levels of trust and confidence in the prison, and 2) to learn how to engage inmates better in their everyday life inside prison, e.g. through engaging them in collective matters. The process of co-inquiry and co-creation provided a new social infrastructure, which allowed inmates and prison officers to access new roles and social positions.

Codesigning with public partners: controversies and agonism

This workshop invites participatory design (PD) researchers and practitioners to consider and exchange experiences of controversies and agonism in codesign projects with citizens and various public partners. Many public actors like departments and other units in county and city councils, municipalities, hospitals etc. are entering codesign projects as a way of engaging citizens or patients in social, urban or medical innovation projects. Often private actors are also part of these partnerships forming the so-called quadruple helix partnerships. While codesign approaches do indeed present new possibilities for the development of interesting and sustainable design innovations we have often experienced controversies and agonism caused by for instance different political agendas, beliefs and values among the participants. This workshop will focus on sharing of and reflection on challenges of navigating between diverging opinions, political agendas and values of citizens and professional public actors in codesign projects. We will discuss how to navigate in such quadruple helix partnerships while doing PD projects as democratic processes. The outcome of the workshop is a large poster visualizing a landscape with specific examples of controversies and agonism, including identification of the roles of essential socio-material collectives of humans and non-humans and reflections on tactics and strategies for how to handle specific situations.

Migration of a sharing platform from Copenhagen to Aarhus: a live exploration of how social innovations may travel

Later developments in community-based PD have put a focus on how societal challenges and technological possibilities call for new forms of participation and civic engagement. In particular, lack of resources promotes public engagement in social innovation, and highlights questions of how innovations developed in a local community can successfully travel to other settings. In this full-day workshop, we take a hands-on approach in exploring how social innovations can travel between different settings through a concrete design case. A digital platform co-designed with stakeholders in a municipality in Copenhagen and in two neighbourhood groups in Vienna is brought to the workshop. Representatives from the city of Aarhus will participate as local stakeholders to engage with workshop participants in a one-day designathon to explore the challenges of appropriating this social innovation to the local setting of Aarhus. Participants will leave with concrete experiences from an exploration of how a particular social innovation can travel; involving real stakeholders in co-design of solutions to the challenges at hand.