Politics of mattering in the practices of participatory design

Abstract

In this paper, 1 we join those in the field of Participatory Design (PD) that have become inspired by the "ontological turn" as captured in the proliferating discussions around relationality, becoming, and nonhuman agency. The paper offers an account from a PD case where a social media platform was designed with and by professionals for their collaboration around the topic of workplace bullying and harassment. Through this account, this paper reimagines PD in a "posthuman landscape" and explores how this ontological turn forces-and/or enables-a rethinking of ethics and politics in PD. In a timely conference which asks for scrutinizing the ways that the political heritage of democracy, participation, and equality can be enacted in the diverse terrains of PD, our short paper proposes the "politics of mattering" as a way of accounting for the design process as an always-relational becoming and its practices as already-political. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Interaction Design → Participatory design.

Overcoming Barriers to Including Agricultural Workers in the Co‐Design of New AgTech: Lessons from a COVID‐19‐Present World

“…This paper draws on our auto‐ethnographic experiences as sociologists working on the Community Technology Adoption Team of the MaaraTech Project—a five‐year‐long, multi‐university, transdisciplinary project co‐designing robotic, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies with AI capabilities to benefit Aotearoa New Zealand’s 2 viticulture and horticulture industries (further details on the project will be shared in our empirical sections). Our approach in this paper extends the work of Pihkala and Karasti (2018) who also apply Barad’s theoretical frameworks to design processes, in their case the design of a social media platform to address workplace bullying and harassment. The authors use the phrase “politics of mattering” to highlight how participatory design—which uses co‐design as a method—is always political in the ways that particular choices about research design and inclusion are made by people with decision‐making capabilities in response to an identified problematic or desired outcome.…”

The Promise of Empathy

“…Commitment 1: Rather than seek to represent another's experience, we seek partnerships in imagining the design encounter. Building on decades of work in participatory design and disability activism (see [ [10], [15], [32], [54], [55], [71], [72], [94]]), we argue for developing partnerships in ways that animate new types of collective futures, what Shaowen Bardzell calls "an ambitious, even literary, imagination" [ [11]]. Disability studies scholar Alison Kafer and colleagues similarly propose coalition building in response to disability simulation activities.…”

“…Our analysis draws from a growing body of literature examining design's promise and idealism [[46], [47], [56], [79], [85]] as well as disparate strands of theorizing within disability studies, feminist philosophy, and participatory design (e.g., [[4], [6], [39], [54], [55], [72]]). Our understanding of the term 'disability' borrows from Alison Kafer [[48]], who describes how disability arises relationally when people with impairments are not anticipated, producing encounters inaccessible for people with body/mind impairments.…”

A Hauntology of Participatory Speculation

“…In response to these challenges, PD has engaged with a range of concepts from feminist STS in order to develop practices that have the capacity to stay with the trouble [27] in a range of contexts [28,34,37]. Such commitments foster PD practices marked by a 'willingness to open up to the world in its complex relationality, responsible and accountable for the open-ended and unexpected.'…”