Five enunciations of empowerment in participatory design

Abstract

Participatory design has been defined as having 'user's democratic participation and empowerment at its core' (Correia and Yusop, 2008). The PD discourse has a strong moral and rhetorical claim by its emphasis on users' empowerment. This paper is a result of a student project, guided by a curiosity about how empowerment is enunciated in the PD field today. In a literature-review of academic papers from the proceedings of PDC 2008 we found that empowerment is enunciated in five different ways which can be translated into 5 categories: 1) Specific user groups 2) Direct democracy 3) The users' position 4) Researchers' practice 5) Reflexive practice. These categories exist conjointly in the literature and suggest that empowerment is not just a moral and politically correct design goal, but a challenged and complex activity.

The problem of de-sign as conjuring

“…The argument in this work reflects PD's traditional concerns with the politics of design (Kensing andBloomberg, 1996, Beck, 2002) and the empowerment of users (Ertner et al, 2010). Concerns about a shift in power relations have characterised PD since its infancy (Greenbaum, 1993).…”

Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World

“…According to Ertner et al (2010), 'the PD researcher's practice is guided by unconscious assumptions and socially specific knowledge, which become reproduced and embedded in methods, categories and interpretations. By this the practitioner poses a risk of dominating the users, if they neglect to focus explicitly on deconstructing the tacit aspects of their own practice'.…”

Exploration of facilitation, materials and group composition in participatory design sessions

“…However, empowerment is enunciated in current PD research in diverse ways, including, among others, empowering specific user groups, enabling direct democracy on social and political matters and strengthening the users' position in design processes (Ertner et al, 2010). Other enunciations are targeted at the role of the researcher/facilitator (see next subsection).…”

“…In specific, we investigate the following: (1) What role does the facilitator need to fulfil in order to engage and guide participants? (2) What materials support the creative (inter-)action of the participants? (3) How should the groups be composed in order to allow for engagement of all participants?…”