Peter Danholt

Participation as a matter of concern in participatory design

This article starts from the paradox that, although participation is a defining trait of participatory design (PD), there are few explicit discussions in the PD literature of what constitutes participation. Thus, from a point of departure in Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this article develops an analytical understanding of participation. It is argued that participation is a matter of concern, something inherently unsettled, to be investigated and explicated in every design project. Specifically, it is argued that (1) participation is an act overtaken by numerous others, rather than carried out by individuals and (2) that participation partially exists in all elements of a project. These traits are explicated in a design project called ‘Teledialogue’, where the participants are unfolded as networks of reports, government institutions, boyfriends, social workers and so on. The argument is synthesised as three challenges for PD: (1) participants are network configurations, (2) participation is an aspect of all project activities and (3) there is no gold standard for participation.

Prototypes as performative

This paper considers performative aspects of prototyping in design. Drawing on STS and a casestudy involving a prototypical disease management technology, it exemplify and discuss prototyping as a performative process that produces specific subjectivities and bodies. Prototypes are not only vehicles for learning or containers of ideas, but material things that prescribe, animate and produce bodies and agencies. Viewed as such perplexity, inconsistency and contradictions is not anomalies in design, but to be expected because users as well as designers are in a process of exploration and experimentation. Equally prototypes are both concrete and present as well imaginary and futuristic. The author argue that designers and researchers should sensitize themselves to performative aspects of prototyping in order to understand the mutually transformative consequences for both artifacts and humans in these processes.

Factish relations: Affective bodies in diabetes treatment

Chronic diseases pose a major challenge to contemporary western healthcare systems, and consequently there are numerous initiatives designed to meet these challenges. Patient empowerment is considered to be extremely important in chronic disease management. But what does it mean to become an ‘active patient’, managing a condition? This article argues that people are always active in shaping their agency and the agency of numerous others, and that we need to attend to these processes of configuration in order to better understand and conceptualize the problem of chronic disease management. This article analyses the daily practices of people with Type 2 Diabetes, with the use of what is described as the ‘sociology of attachment’ in the field of science and technology studies. The implications of seeing and analysing chronic conditions in this manner are that determinist understandings of chronic conditions are challenged. Accordingly, an experimental and constructive attitude towards the production and assembling of the chronically ill body is enabled. Such an attitude holds that relations with multiple other bodies and entities, such as technologies, the disease, medication and so on continuously and relentlessly affect how the condition unfolds and consequently, the room for interventional strategies and transformation of the chronically ill body is enlarged.

The implementation process of a diabetes EPR

In this paper, we outline and describe the development and implementation process of a Diabetes Electronic Patient Record system (DR). We describe and analyze the process using understandings and concepts from Science, Technology and Society studies (STS). We attribute the status of the current system to various associations and translations, where the project group members become engaged and interested in the process of developing DR in profound ways, an interest that may lack or is difficult to establish in large system development projects.

Privacy encounters in Teledialogue

ABSTRACT Privacy is a major concern when new technologies are introduced between public authorities and private citizens. What is meant by privacy, however, is often unclear and contested. Accordingly, this article utilises grounded theory to study privacy empirically in the research and design project Teledialogue aimed at introducing new ways for public case managers and placed children to communicate through IT. The resulting argument is that privacy can be understood as an encounter, that is, as something that arises between implicated actors and entails some degree of friction and negotiation. An argument which is further qualified through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The article opens with a review of privacy literature before continuing to present privacy as an encounter with five different foci: what technologies bring into the encounter; who is related to privacy by implication; what is entailed by the spaces of Teledialogue; how privacy relates to projected futures; and how privacy is also an encounter between authority and care. In the end, it is discussed how privacy conceptualised as an encounter is not already there surrounding people or places but rather has to be traced in the specific and situated relations between implicated actors, giving rise to different normative concerns in each case.