Practices of readiness: punctuation, poise and the contingencies of participatory design

How do we ready ourselves to intervene responsively in the contingent situations that arise in co-designing to make change? How do we attune to group dynamics and respond ethically to unpredictable developments when working with ‘community’? Participatory Design (PD) can contribute to social transitions, yet its focus is often tightly tuned to technique for designing ICT at the cost of participatory practice. We challenge PD conventions by addressing what happens as we step into a situation to alter it with others, an aspect of practice that cannot be replicated or interchanged. We do so to argue that practices of readiness are constituted by personal histories, experiences, philosophies and culture. We demonstrate this political argument by giving reflexive accounts of our dimensions of preparation. The narratives here are distinct, yet reveal complementary theories and worldviews that shape PD ontologies. We have organized these around the qualities of punctuation and poise as a way to draw out some less easily articulated aspects of PD practice

Design Disruptions for Contested, Contingent and Contradictory Changes

This paper aims to problematise how we step into situations that are often contested, contingent and contradictory. In this context, how can we sharpen our sensitivity to the role design plays in generating understanding and future-making possibilities? Here, we employ the term disruption as a way to question our own knowledge construction and research practices in design anthropology and participatory design. We pursue disruption as a political and necessary consciousness when design anthropology meets participatory design and discuss the generative, reflexive and analytical dimensions of disruption through three vignettes. These vignettes raise questions of how we interrogate disruptions of power to consider different ways in which this manifests when entering into and participating in on-going changing process. They also highlight the need to displace existing knowledge, rather than pursuing 'mutual learning' that had been a defining commitment of participatory design. Lastly, the vignettes reveal the need to disrupt the designer-researcher in order to surrender to contradiction and contingency as part of future-making

Design disruptions in contested, contingent and contradictory future-making

This paper aims to problematise how we step into situations that are often contested, contingent and contradictory. In this context, how can we sharpen our sensitivity to the role design plays in generating understanding and future-making possibilities? Here, we employ the term disruption as a way to question our own knowledge construction and research practices in design anthropology and participatory design. We pursue disruption as a political and necessary consciousness when design anthropology meets participatory design and discuss the generative, reflexive and analytical dimensions of disruption through three vignettes. These vignettes raise questions of how we interrogate disruptions of power to consider different ways in which this manifests when entering into and participating in on-going changing process. They also highlight the need to displace existing knowledge, rather than pursuing 'mutual learning' that had been a defining commitment of participatory design. Lastly, the vignettes reveal the need to disrupt the designer-researcher in order to surrender to contradiction and contingency as part of future-making