Participation in Design Things

Pelle Ehn

Proceedings Participatory Design Conference 2008

Participatory design: involve users in the design of the thing they will use, “use before use.” Participatory design is seen as potentially assistive in solving the problem of anticipating user behavior. Meta-design, or “design after design,” is another approach that focuses on the some problem *after the release / implementation of the product/ artifact / strategy.

Discusses “design-games,” and prototypes as boundary objects; Notes on the “design project:”

“A project is the common form for aligning resources (people and technology) in all larger design endeavors.” incl, deadlines, consumables, etc. “The outcome of a design project is both a device and a thing.” Thing is still only vaguely defined here and I need to refer to her source. ref stages of development / design process. A participatory approach may look for “staging” how is it made into a public thing? This is only a part of the collective imagining of a device. Much of this essay seems to fall just shy of a discussion of “real”– not just metaphorical ecosystems.

Participatory design as empowerment: Listing of particpatory design approaches, discussion of roots (historical) and motivations; Design-games; Non-human design participants and representatives; Meta-design (design after design); Infrastructuring strategies: protocoling and formatting, likely important ref. to Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” and it’s relationship to design patterns in software engineering. Reread for refs to “ecology of devices.” (Bateson).

Social Software - Participation and Controversial Things: Latour and Dewey. Wikipedia, the commons and social software. Again, I see a romanticization of “bottom-up” and participatory approaches here. I support those, but they won’t benefit from naive idealism. This isn’t a charged against Ehn, though. I think it might be worth looking at critiques of the Rural Studio. There were some other activist/ community oriented projects I remember from a Lebbeus Woods interview.