The value of the “co-”
How can we increase our understanding of how participatory design takes place in non-mainstream contexts?2020 - Present
MIT Media Lab | Diversa
Colombia
#PD #HCI
︎ In progress
Motivation
Participatory Design (PD) continues to be leveraged with the purpose of making design processes more democratic, especially when it comes to eliciting and integrating various stakeholders’ input. As participatory design practices and methods continue to expand worldwide, there is a need to increase our understanding of how they can produce benefit/detriment to participants and communities, especially those historically marginalized. We join the call for more assessment and evaluation studies within the PD field. At the same time, it is vital to highlight local, world-making practices from across the globe in order to defuse dominant design narratives. We contribute theory and practice on how these experiences at the margin—yet not marginal— can play a part in expanding concepts and methods within PD.
Up: Participants from the Climate Change Adaptation summit in Colombia.
Lower left: internal components board of a low-cost, portable solar lantern.
Lower right: Use cases for the lantern
Lower left: internal components board of a low-cost, portable solar lantern.
Lower right: Use cases for the lantern
What we did
In this project, we are providing systematic, multi-year analyses of how participatory experiences in technology design allocate benefits across different groups. We demonstrate how a particular program provided benefits with regard to skill development to local communities’ participants, yet international participants showed greater learning gains overall. We called this an exploration on the “value of the ‘co’”.
In approaching participation critically, we offer the notion of pseudo-participation and illustrate how it unfolds in the context of civic digital platforms. We also provide accounts of participatory projects in Colombia, largely inspired in Indigenous epistemologies, in order to incentivize new practices within the Participatory Design (PD) field. This is the case of the “Saber y Vida” program. Lastly, we offer critical accounts on how experiences like these and the notions they contain, can permeate conceptual traditions in PD. We do this through a speculative analysis of the academic review process.
In approaching participation critically, we offer the notion of pseudo-participation and illustrate how it unfolds in the context of civic digital platforms. We also provide accounts of participatory projects in Colombia, largely inspired in Indigenous epistemologies, in order to incentivize new practices within the Participatory Design (PD) field. This is the case of the “Saber y Vida” program. Lastly, we offer critical accounts on how experiences like these and the notions they contain, can permeate conceptual traditions in PD. We do this through a speculative analysis of the academic review process.
Up left/right: a ‘word circle’ at the ‘Casa de Pensamiento’. The hearth lies at the centre of the circle. Photos from the archives of the ‘Aula Viva’ process. Credit: Aula Viva archives
Down: chart of the role of participation in pseudo-participatory processes
Down: chart of the role of participation in pseudo-participatory processes
Contributions
Quantitative and qualitative data analysis, Critical theory analysisCollaborators
Andres Sicard Currea, Carolina Botero, Daniela Ramos, Diego Gómez-Hoyos, Bibiana Serpa, Christoph Becker, Claudia Grisales-Bohórquez, Gloria Muñoz Martinez, Iñaki Goñi, Marisol Wong-Villacres, Matti Nelimarkka, Oscar Lemus, Victoria PalacinOutputs
Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., & Delgado Ramos, D. (2020, June). Community-based technology co-design: insights on participation, and the value of the “co”. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020-Participation (s) Otherwise-Volume 1 .Palacin, V., Nelimarkka, M., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., & Becker, C. (2020). The Design of Pseudo-Participation. Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 2, 40–44.
Grisales-Bohórquez, C., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., Muñoz Martinez, G. I., & Sicard Currea, A. (2022). Participation reimagined: Co-design of the self through territory, memory, and dignity. CoDesign, 18(1), 78–94.
Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., Grisales, C., Wong-Villacrés, M., Serpa, B., Goñi, J. I., & Lemus, O. A. (2022, August). Reviews Gone South: A Subversive Experiment on Participatory Design Canons: Dedicated to the Memory of Oscar A. Lemus. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022-Volume 1 .
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