Authors:
Daria Loi, Raphael Arar
Over the past year, while collaborating on a chapter for an upcoming handbook, we had the opportunity to reflect on the persistent historical tensions that exist between academic and nonacademic sectors when applying and implementing participatory design (PD). In this column, we elaborate on these reflections and our process.
While academic PD is often focused on research findings and is typically publication-driven, nonacademic PD tends to be driven by project-based outcomes focused on organizational goals. The discrepancies between these outcomes have led to pronounced tensions among the PD community— tensions that, in our experience, run deep. A historical review of the PD Conference (PDC) series offers rich insights into the challenges behind these outcomes.
The first PDC, in 1990, was aimed at developing an understanding of PD while exploring how it could be applied in "the design of 'off-the-shelf' applications" [1]. This led to diverse contributions, with a balanced conference program and the absence of polarizing terminology around the distinction between academic and nonacademic work. In 2010, however, the narrative began to shift. Due to a notable dominance of academic contributions, PDC 2010 included in its program industry cases—a separate track created to attract authors and practitioners from nonacademic backgrounds, sans a full academic paper submission. PDC continued to grow in popularity as an academic outlet, which muddied its original intent to serve as a cross-context community, as discussed by Aki Namioka and Douglas Schuler [1]. PDC 2014's program included a full, single-track industry day designed for practitioners to share and contribute without the constraint of an academic format. While well attended, the event highlighted a clear fissure in the community. A critical mass of academics did not attend this designated day; many of them provided feedback that the day had little value for them. The original intent to broaden scope and inclusivity had backfired. PDC 2016 resumed industry cases by omitting a paper requirement, nesting these cases within an Interactive Exhibition track. PDC 2018 marked yet another shift, and included a call for practitioners to consider all conference formats, with the caveat that they had to submit an academic paper if they wished to share their research and knowledge beyond interactive installations.
It is extremely complex to track and make a narrative out of the many facets of nonacademic PD.
By 2018, the PDC community was dominantly academic. Concurrently, the PDC Advisory Board had been tracking a slow yet persistent narrowing of the community and the need to attract new audiences. Coupled with an increased urge to move beyond traditional PDC locations (i.e., North America and Europe) to ensure global representation, the trend created the conditions to extend the community both geographically and beyond dominantly academic territories. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, PDC 2020 was hosted remotely but centered in Colombia; and, in an attempt to reengage practitioners, a Beyond Academia track emerged with the explicit instruction that academic papers were not required. Instead, after responding to a few specific questions about the nature of their proposal, practitioners were provided with enough freedom to describe their case or topic and include audiovisual material to complement their submission. A written submission, however, was still a requirement for participation. For PDC 2022, the written submission requirement was, for the first time, removed entirely, and the Beyond Academia track followed an invite-only model, bringing together facilitated panels shaped around preselected themes that were collaboratively constructed with panelists. Given the success of this new model with audiences and participating practitioners, PDC 2024 will follow a similar format.
This historical summary demonstrates how the PDC community shifted over a few decades and its complex journey to reconcile diverse PD communities under the same roof—inclusively and equitably.
The tensions, complexities, and lack of recognition for and understanding of the type of participatory work that occurs outside of academic contexts have been palpable for years. The terminology used by PD academics to describe PD work outside of academia (e.g., PD in industry) offers a sampling of that lack of understanding, as it casts a narrow lens to describe the wide-ranging participatory practice that has emerged over the past decade and continues to shape contemporary participatory design today. Nonacademic PD practice is wildly diverse and, as Blomberg [2] described, includes participatory design work in commercial sectors (i.e., corporations, consultancies, agencies, start-ups, and other profit-generating ventures), nonprofit sectors (i.e., nonprofits, foundations, and philanthropic organizations), and public sectors (i.e., government and other governmental agencies). Because of the substantial differences among these three contexts, the term industry is, in our view, a monolithic and narrow lens with which to describe the scope of nonacademic PD practice—a set of practices delineated by varied motivations. Some of these motivations might align with and, at best, extend PD's core tenets. But at times, this "industry" work may conflict with PD's emancipatory values and motivations, such as commercial design work directed at increasing profits through greater use, public design work intended to strengthen legislated consultation processes, and social impact design oriented at reframing complex social policy issues. Truth be told, it is extremely complex to track and make a narrative out of the many facets of nonacademic PD. Not only do they take shape in diverse contexts but also many practitioners label their participatory work as codesign, or use labels to describe work that, while participatory in nature, is best described using sector-specific terms better suited for adoption by context-specific stakeholders.
The tensions are pronounced and, from our vantage point, they will continue to be more visible in the coming years. So why have these tensions grown? We have identified a few key factors that run counter to efforts to de-silo academic and nonacademic PD practice:
- For-profit goals often contradict the purity of PD's founding tenets. For-profit contexts and classic PD values (i.e., a democratic and power-balanced approach to design) are often at odds with each other, even if one can argue that contemporary academic institutions are closer to for-profit organizations in their operations.
- The exclusivity and rigorous research approach of academia often alienates nonacademic PD practitioners. The exclusivity of academia often alienates commercial, nonprofit, and public sector practitioners without academic backgrounds or history. This breeds a sterile ground for participation, cross-pollination, and debate.
- The currency frequently used to generate debate around participatory design creates friction. While practitioners rely on less-formal methods (e.g., blogs and talks) to disseminate their work, which takes shape as discrete projects with outcomes, academics value and are required to rely on manuscripts and peer-reviewed publications.
We argue that these factors have contributed to a widening gap between PD in academia and PD in nonacademic contexts, creating the conditions for powerful and important variants of participatory design outside of academia to become less visible, hard to track, and even be labeled nonparticipatory design.
While it is important to acknowledge the tension between academic and nonacademic PD practice, we propose that the future of a holistic and thriving PD ecosystem relies on the following:
- New ways to identify and describe the breadth of nonacademic participatory practices that have emerged or only just become visible by the PD community over the past decade.
- Revised criteria currently used to determine what is (and isn't) participatory design.
- New metrics that can provide overdue and adequate legitimacy to important and underrecognized nonacademic participatory design approaches.
- Improved vocabulary to ensure that deeply participatory practitioners, practices, and work are not excluded but rather become visible to academic-led communities such as the Participatory Design Conference.
Since its beginnings, participatory design practice has evolved enormously, both in technique and scope. It has become a wildly diverse and rich field, spanning multiple application contexts and involving diverse practitioners. Such growth, however, has been disproportionately tracked through an academic lens, leaving a significant gap in the community's ability to track and learn from important nonacademic work. We argue that this gap has created conditions that limit academic participatory design's disciplinary growth and, even worse, trend toward unproductive self-referential debates. The PD community has the opportunity to embrace the rich diversity of current practices. By fostering critical discourse and encouraging cross-pollination, we can advance the field to higher levels of maturity, ensuring that it embraces and more accurately reflects the full spectrum of participatory design as it is practiced today.
Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge Penny Hagen, coauthor of the book chapter mentioned at the start of this article, and her valuable contributions, which were foundational to the development of this article.
References
1. Namioka, A. and Schuler, D., eds. Proc. of the 1st Biennial Participatory Design Conference. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, 1990.
2. Blomberg, J. Embedding participatory agendas in industry: The legacy of PD. Proc. of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Short Papers, Industry Cases, Workshop Descriptions, Doctoral Consortium papers, and Keynote abstracts - Volume 2. ACM, New York, 2014, 115; https://doi.org/10.1145/2662155.2662239
Authors
Daria Loi combines design strategy with experience research and innovation to enrich people's lives and humanize technology. She is chief experience officer at Astral and owner and founder of Imperfecta, an art and design gallery focused on women artists and minority creatives. She serves on the DemocracyLab board of directors, and is an honorary professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia. [email protected]
Raphael Arar is head of design at One Project, an organization focused on codesigning and scaling new economic and governance systems that are equitable, ecological, and effective. He previously led design for learners at Khan Academy, worked on the ethical considerations of AI at IBM Research, and designed 100-plus apps with Apple. As an educator, he has taught media arts and theory at the University of Southern California, San José State University, California Institute of the Arts, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. [email protected]
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The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2024 ACM, Inc.
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