[AISWorld] Call for participation: workshop at PDC 2014: Analyzing the politics of PD

[Tone Bratteteig]

Workshop ‘Analyzing the politics of PD: a conceptual investigation’

In conjunction with PDC 2014, Windhoek, Namibia: http://www.pdc2014.org/
Monday, October 6, 2014

Organizers: Tone Bratteteig and Ina Wagner, University of Oslo
More information: http://www.pdcpolitics.no/

TOPIC
This workshop discusses power, participation and the politics of PD. It 
invites participants to use their own experiences with and material from 
PD projects for exploring the political dimension of PD. Their PD 
experiences will be explored collaboratively with the aim of arriving at 
a deeper and more specific understanding of what the users participate 
in and how they can recognize their influence in the design result. This 
exploration will be supported by a set of concepts that have proved 
helpful in understanding the politics of PD: power, decision-making, and 
participation. The conceptual framework we propose has been inspired by 
Schön’s notion of ‘design moves’ and by Alfred Schütz’ concept of 
choice. In design – as in certain situations in everyday life – we make 
choices and select among them, with every design move closing some 
choices whilst opening others. Understanding this dynamic is important 
for recognizing what users actually participate in: creating choices, 
selecting a choice, materializing a choice, ‘seeing’/evaluating the 
result of a choice. Analysing how choices are opened and closed and who 
participates in decision-making as an element of participatory design 
practice leads to a more precise understanding of power issues.

Based on these concepts we can identify a number of questions that are 
helpful for disentangling power and decision-making in PD:

1. How participatory was problem setting or problem definition in a PD 
project? How did participatory designers arrange for the users to be 
able to contribute to choices (of problems to be addressed, of possible 
solutions)? Which methods were used and how successful were these methods?
2. How did the users participate in the design solution, in what Schön 
calls ‘design move’, selecting particular choices (while excluding others)?
3. Did the users contribute to implementing or materializing choices? 
What types of skills were they encouraged to mobilize? How did the 
users’ contributions affect the technical part of the implementation?
4. How important were the users in the ‘seeing’/evaluating part of 
design moves? Did their ‘seeing’ conflict with the ‘seeing’ of the 
designers?
5. How can we understand the interrelationships between choices? How did 
decisions that were taken before the project (e.g. its institutional 
framing, temporal structures, available technologies, commitments and 
aims) shape the design space? Which of the design choices evoked or 
precluded alternative solutions, enabled a promising new choice? How 
participatory were the important decisions, those that opened up and 
closed many choices?
6. How participatory is the design result in the sense of increasing the 
‘power to’ of users? Can users recognize their influence in the design 
result?

HOW TO PARTICIPATE
Interested participants are invited to submit a position paper of 
1000-2000 words, which will be reviewed by the workshop organizers.
Position papers should be based on a ‘case’ - empirical material from a 
PD project. Participants should address _at least one_ of the questions 
outlined in the workshop proposal. For the workshop it is important to 
have rather specific material for applying the concepts so as to arrive 
at a deeper understanding of how participative the projects were.

IMPORTANT DATES
22 July        Submission deadline for position papers
28 July        Communication of acceptance
5 Aug        Early registration
6 Oct        Workshop