Yanki Lee

Design participation tactics: the challenges and new roles for designers in the co-design process

This paper seeks to redefine ‘user participation in design’ and to articulate new roles for designers in order to transform design processes. The term ‘Design Participation’ was introduced in the 1971 Design Research Society conference. The main focus of this paper is to suggest ways to tackle three areas that have been neglected over 30 years of Design Participation development, namely: the aesthetic quality of design practice, the collaborative relationship of design research and participatory design thinking. The paper is a reflection by a professional designer developed through the experience of working with different groups in action research projects and these concrete case studies are used to illustrate the developing theory. Three areas of challenges were identified and the overall aim was to facilitate innovative collaboration and create platforms for social inclusion in design practice. Addressing these challenges, it is essential to reconsider the roles of designers (design developer, facilitator and generator) in order to achieve user participation in design. However, in order to avoid tokenism, the most important thing is to practice these roles as tactics of Design Participation.

New roles of designers in democratic innovation: a case study in the ingenuity of ageing

This paper discusses a study of a group of retired academics that are actively ageing on their university campus in China. We worked with this group of ingenious older people and conducted a series of Creative Dialogues and Design Festivals to see how designers accomplish infrastructuring and mobilization in design participatory innovation for an ageing population. Inspired by the idea of the design process as Things and the concept of community-of-practice, we analysed how they design their lives. We found important new roles for designers in the critique of design ideology and the identification of utopian elements from the participants.

'Teaching the teachers' investigating new inclusive design experience to enable secondary school students to think creatively

A new funded public engagement project that aims to introduce principles and tools of inclusive design to secondary school teachers and enable them to teach their students to think creatively. The research team is a multi-disciplinary one with common belief in inclusive design. Team members include engineers, design researchers, ergonomists and a pedagogy researcher. This paper explains the background and rationale of the project. More important, we found three tensions among these different academic and practical disciplines that were identified in the first planning meeting of this 18-month project. We also found their implications to participatory design and for reflections at the later stage of the project.