Towards commons design in participatory design

Abstract

This article probes what the Participatory Design (PD) field can gain from exploring the literature on commons.Through selected examples we point to some connections and commonalities between that literature and the PD field. In doing this, we also bring forward several contributions that this literature can make to PD in order to develop design strategies and approaches to commons design. We believe these can further PD practices and research and help PD to operate with and thrive within increasingly complex design issues and contexts.

From computational thinking to computational empowerment

“…While it has been argued that PD's political engagement has declined (e.g. [6,12,38]), it remains evident in PD's history and is, arguably, alive and well in new guises that have gained traction in recent years; the creation of 'commons' [44] and 'design things' [25] carry with them the concern for democratic approaches to development and empowering local communities to act in a political landscape. We believe that PD's insistence on responding to top-down technological processes with initiatives that provide people with skills, knowledge and agency makes it highly relevant within contemporary debates of digitalization.…”

Institutioning the common

“…In the changing society and PD agenda we have described, the focus on institutioning becomes more and more relevant, especially the one on supporting the emergence of new institutions, being it the construction of łmiddle elementž, an institutional element safeguarding and promoting PD [31], or the efort to co-construct autonomous practices with social groups more afected by the transformations of contemporary capitalism [12]. Such a political agenda has the potential to intersect other ongoing research and activist initiatives, like that of promoting the commons as a form of management of shared resources (briely discussed in PD by Marttila et al [32], and Teli et al [28]) or the agenda for łplatform cooperativismž, in which alternative models of ownership of digital platforms based on workers' control are proposed [33]. The commons and cooperative movements add an institutional character to the efort of PD of granting people control on the technologies they are going to use [9] and therefore constitute a promising perspective to combine the possibility of łnourishing the commonž with łinstitutioningž.…”

Abelhas, drones e outras Coisas no espaço público: fazendo estratégias na cidade

“…There is a small but growing body of research on participation and collaboration in design elaborating now on these ideas. From a design perspective, drawing attention to the specificities of designing new commons or contributing to existing ones requires new understanding of the materialities of collaborative production (Seravalli, 2014), engaging with the implications of such intangibles as intellectual property rights (Marttila and Hyyppä, 2014), reframing the roles of users and designers in terms of commoners (Marttila et al, 2014b) and developing sensitivities to long-term social processes of maintenance and governance (Marttila et al, 2014a) Commoning then could also entail an explicit political engagement to strengthening not just any social practices and social groups, but those that in particular nourish the common (Teli, 2015;Teli et al, 2015). In terms of acting within the city, there is an increasing recognition of the need to rethink urgently many of its spaces in terms of urban commons that could be co-designed (e.g., Seravalli et al, 2015).…”