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Participatory design and sustainability: a literature review of PDC proceedings

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Abstract

This exploratory paper examines the relationship between Participatory Design (PD) and Sustainability as it emerges from the Participatory Design Conference (PDC). The reinvigorated political agenda of PD, together with the enlargements of its application domains and scopes of interest, calls for reinvigorating the early concerns of the field for long-term, durable, and positive change. The objective of this paper is to explore what "sustainability" means in and for the field. The study is based on a literature review of the PDC Proceedings and it provides both an outline of the structural aspects of the literature and a mapping of three use patterns of the concept: PD for Sustainability; Sustainability of PD Practice; and Sustainability of PD Results. Based on our interpretation of these patterns we also provide a general definition of sustainability. We believe the findings of this paper can support PD scholars in conceptualizing sustainability and to position their works in relation to it.
Participatory Design and Sustainability–a literature review of
PDC Proceedings
Giacomo Poderi
IT University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
gipo@itu.dk
Yvonne Dittrich
IT University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
ydi@itu.dk
ABSTRACT
This exploratory paper examines the relationship between Par-
ticipatory Design (PD) and Sustainability as it emerges from the
Participatory Design Conference (PDC). The reinvigorated political
agenda of PD, together with the enlargements of its application
domains and scopes of interest, calls for reinvigorating the early
concerns of the eld for long-term, durable, and positive change.
The objective of this paper is to explore what “sustainability” means
in and for the eld. The study is based on a literature review of the
PDC Proceedings and it provides both an outline of the structural
aspects of the literature and a mapping of three use patterns of
the concept: PD for Sustainability;Sustainability of PD Practice; and
Sustainability of PD Results. Based on our interpretation of these
patterns we also provide a general denition of sustainability. We
believe the ndings of this paper can support PD scholars in con-
ceptualizing sustainability and to position their works in relation
to it.
CCS CONCEPTS
Human-centered computing Participatory design;
KEYWORDS
Sustainability, literature review, PDC proceedings
ACM Reference Format:
Giacomo Poderi and Yvonne Dittrich. 2018. Participatory Design and Sustainability–
a literature review of PDC Proceedings. In PDC ’18: Proceedings of the 15th
Participatory Design Conference - Volume 2, August 20–24, 2018, Hasselt and
Genk, Belgium. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3210604.3210624
1 INTRODUCTION
Since more than a decade, Participatory Design (PD) enlarged and
diversied its main focus of interests to encompass contexts that go
beyond, for instance, IT design for work practices, and that cover
aspects, such as commons, living labs and publics, only to name
a few [
2
,
27
,
28
]. This results in farther reaching implications for
both the people involved in processes of socio-technical change
and their contexts; and it brings back to the forefront the concern
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3210604.3210624
for long-term, durable, and positive change that characterized PD
since its early years.
The durability of PD projects outcomes has always been con-
sidered an important challenge to be addressed for the diusion
of PD eld itself. Indeed, the lack to achieve such durability is a
major barrier for having concrete inuence on society, beyond the
sphere of a research and experimental practice [
11
,
32
]. Various
scholars engaged with the tangled theoretical, ethical and practical
relationship between PD and long-term implications or durability
of interventions. For instance, for Bødker [
3
] the value of a PD
intervention is primarily about empowering participants and their
contexts, so that such empowerment will be meaningful also after
the PD project ends. Similarly, Kensing and colleagues [
25
] held
sustainability a grounding principle to allow IT systems to integrate
more seamlessly into existing work practices. Others emphasized
the relevance and challenges to explore PD practices in contexts
that are not (any more) dened by a researcher, and to look at these
challenges also from a perspective of sustainability [
15
]. However,
for far too long, the topic of sustainability has been subsumed un-
der the one of mutual learning. As a consequence, the challenges
linked to sustainability were considered resolved therein [
24
]. Only
recently PD scholars started devoting specic attention to the topic,
and the eld witnessed an increasing number of articles dealing
with it.
Considering the emergence of a specic interest on sustainability
as a means to revamp a founding concern in PD, this exploratory
paper aims to provide an initial mapping of how sustainability is
conceptually understood and treated by scholars in this eld. The
following general questions guided the work: what do PD scholars
mean or refer to when talking about sustainability (or being sustain-
able)?How does their focus on sustainability relate to their lines of
inquiry or intervention? Since PD comprises a variety of princi-
ples and practices that are adopted for dierent specic objectives,
across a wide spectrum of possible application domains [
33
], we
wanted the meaning(s) of “sustainability” to emerge from its actual
use in research, rather than, for instance, evaluating how sustain-
ability is practiced or achieved, based on a preconceived denitions
of what “sustainability” is or should be
1
. Following these objectives,
we grounded our work on the literature review of the most pres-
tigious, oldest, and highly-ranked conference of the eld, namely
the biennial Participatory Design Conference (PDC).
This paper is structured as follows. In the next section, we clarify
the methodology we adopted for the literature review and sum-
marize the main outcomes of the search. In Section 3, we outline
1
As a clarication, it is not intention of this work to say anything about the quality of
the published works that have been reviewed, but it is rather an attempt to describe
the dierent ways of using the concept.
PDC ’18, August 20–24, 2018, Hasselt and Genk, Belgium G. Poderi and Y. Dirich
Table 1: Distribution of publications by type and year
2002 2010 2012 2014 2016 TOT
Full [8] [5, 21] [12] 4
Short [26]
[
13
,
17
]
[
7
,
18
,
19
,
23
,
30, 34]
[
1
,
9
,
20]
12
Other [29] [4, 14]
[
16
,
22
]
5
TOT 1 4 3 8 5 21
the descriptive results of the review, which considered some of the
logical and structural aspects of the articles. Section 4 presents the
three main clusters that we identied from the literature - PD for
Sustainability;Sustainability of PD Practice; and Sustainability of
PD Results. In the last section, we highlight the crosscutting aspects
among these areas and provide a general denition of sustainability.
2 METHODOLOGY
In this section, we present our research methodology and material.
With the research question, which we presented above, in mind,
we ran a literature search through Scopus. We focused on the “ACM
International Conference Proceeding” series, and limited the search
to the PDC Proceedings. As the search string, we used “sustain*” in
order to cover also relevant publications that used various conju-
gations of the term, such as sustainable, sustained, and sustaining.
We searched in any of the Title,Abstract, and Keywords elds. In
addition, we complemented this search with a manual scanning of
pdcproceedings.org to cover those conference editions which were
not indexed by Scopus under the ACM series.
The search returned 21 items, out of the 693 publications of
various type that build up the corpus of PDC’s 14 editions. All
the items that we found, except one, belong to the four latest edi-
tions of the conference: 2002 (1), 2010 (4), 2012 (3), 2014 (8), 2016
(5). As shown in Table 1, the set includes full research papers (4),
short exploratory papers (12), and other types of submission (5), i.e.
workshops, exhibitions, and posters. We included all items in the
analysis.
Initially, the rst author skimmed through the papers and built
a simple spreadsheet, which was shared between the two authors.
The following questions were used to identify relevant information
in each article and to populate the spreadsheet: how does sustain-
ability link to the paper objectives? How is “sustainability” dened?
What is the specic target of sustainability, in the paper? This rst
step was useful to obtain the initial descriptive ndings that we
present in the next section, and to guide a more detailed reading of
the papers. In the following step, we reviewed and discussed the
elements of the spreadsheet in an iterative and inductive manner.
The purpose was to nd commonalities or points of convergence
among papers. The result of this process is the grouping we describe
in Section 4.
In the next section, we summarize the initial ‘descriptive’ nd-
ings, which concerned the logical and structural aspects of the
articles, as they emerged from the three aforementioned questions.
3 LITERATURE SEARCH RESULTS
3.1 Sustainability and PD objectives
Half of the papers relate to the concept of sustainability as a central
aspect of their objectives. That is to say that they explicitly bring
“sustainability” in the formulation of the papers’ objectives. Such
as in the following example.
Objectives of the paper are: i) to clarify how Participa-
tory Design could support the sustainability and eec-
tiveness of an alternative, ii) to present an experimen-
tation with renewable energy as CPR as an alternative
model to the actual vision of the energy system. [9]
The other half of the papers sample is more varied and is split
between papers where sustainability is a contextual trait of the
objectives or papers where it is either irrelevant or impossible to
judge it. This was mainly due to the lack of explicit objectives in
the papers. However, at a general level, it is possible to notice that
“sustainability”, in relation to the paper objectives, is treated in the
majority of cases as a desired outcome. In other cases, it is treated
as a contextual domain, a challenge to be solved, or an inherent
characteristic of the method or tools used.
3.2 Dening “sustainability”
Quite surprisingly, the concept of sustainability is treated by PD
scholars as given for granted or unquestioned. Only one paper
includes a denition of the concept – understood as an explicit
explanation, supported by references – which is used to place the
paper’s contribution in the specic area of sustainable design:
Blevis’ (2007, p. 503) denition frames sustainable de-
sign as an act of choosing among or informing choices of
future ways of being. Many sustainable design projects
aim to realise future ways of being through generative
participation. [23]
Eight papers provided one or more references (evenly distributed
between PD and sustainability sciences elds), but did not clarify
the concept in the paper. The 12 remaining articles did neither
dene the concept nor referenced supporting literature. They used
an implicit understanding of the concept in line with ‘the ability to
continue or be continued for a long time’
2
. In short, the intentional,
connotative denition of the concept, which species the neces-
sary and sucient conditions of realizing sustainability, is never
addressed.
3.3 The objects of sustainability
In the reviewed papers, the most diverse entities are targeted or
associated with “sustainability”: from IT systems to communities,
from social innovation to participation, from energy use to e-health,
from design to product development, from human living to global
environmental challenges. No clear prevalent object emerged as
catalyst of the concern on sustainability.
As mentioned in the previous section, by taking stock of these
rst ndings, we grouped the articles under the following three
broad areas: PD for Sustainability (PD4S); Sustainability of PD
Practice (SPDP); Sustainability of PD Results (SPDR). As shown in
2
Common denition taken from the Oxford Dictionary: https://www.
oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/
Participatory Design and Sustainability PDC ’18, August 20–24, 2018, Hasselt and Genk, Belgium
Table 2: Grouping of reviewed literature
PD4S [7, 9, 12–14, 16, 23]
SPDP [1, 4, 5, 8, 17, 20, 21, 34]
SPDR [4, 9, 18–20, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 34]
Table 2, the areas are not mutually exclusive and one article can
be found in more than one. For instance,[
9
] is placed both in PD4S
and SPDR: despite being clearly positioned within the problem
areas of sustainability sciences (i.e. energy eciency/behavior),
its core contribution rests on the implications for the long-term
sustainability of the community process, which derives from the
use of a PD approach to enable the process itself.
In the next section, we will discuss these three groups in more
depth, referring to additional research where suitable.
4 EMERGING USE PATTERNS FOR
“SUSTAINABILITY”
4.1 PD for Sustainability
Seven articles fall in this area. In these, PD scholars focus and reect
on how PD can contribute to the areas or topics that are dened by
the various elds of sustainability sciences, broadly understood
3
[
10
,
31
]. Rather than reecting on the theories, methods or challenges
of PD itself, the literature clustered here targets the diverse range
of disciplines that are usually addressed as sustainability sciences –
from sustainable development and sustainable design, to sustainable
living, from environmental science and energy sustainability to
sustainable transports – and it uses PD as a method or approach to
tackle specic challenges of those elds.
The common thread linking PD as contributor to these elds
rests on the core nature of the problems tackled by sustainability
sciences. These are deeply characterized by the need to recong-
ure, realign and renegotiate diverging and heterogeneous interests
in many application domains and at several levels of scale. PD
is perceived as well-equipped with a suitable set of techniques,
methodologies and approaches to address such problems. For in-
stance, Buhmann lays out dierent possible areas where PD can
contribute to transnational rule-making for global sustainability
[
7
]. Here, there is both a need for increasing trust in the process
and for improving the legitimacy of rule-making outputs. The prin-
ciples and approaches of PD can help to foster more transparent
and inclusive IT tools. On another level, technologies for energy
sustainability lack a proper balance between the theory driven
approaches, which often support and drive persuasive technolo-
gies, and more nuanced understanding of people situated needs
and habits. Davis suggests PD as a means to create more ethical
and acceptable persuasive technologies and investigates possible
methods [12].
Furthermore, Huybrechts and colleagues show that PD can also
contribute with concrete methodologies to sustainable design [
23
].
3
None of these works positions itself under the label of sustainability sciences. However,
they all explicitly refer to main (sub)elds or emerging problem areas that can be easily
found in sustainability sciences literature.
Here, the issue of generativity is addressed through the “make-and-
tell” method that is grounded on PD method.
Finally, it is also worth noticing that in a typical PD fashion,
the strength and challenges of PD contributing to sustainability
sciences were addressed through workshops. They engaged dier-
ent scholars and practitioners to come together and address design
challenges e.g. around the topic of sustainable urban planning [
16
]
and PD and ICT for Development [14].
4.2 Sustainability of PD Practice
This area covers eight papers that focus on the reasons and ap-
proaches for addressing the sustainability of PD practice. We refer
here to PD practice as the set of methods, theoretical underpin-
nings and approaches that are actively and intentionally adopted
in concrete, situated contexts.
The rationale behind these papers’ interests has mainly a prag-
matic connotation. Indeed, a PD intervention that has a prolonged,
committed participation of all actors (designers included) through-
out its duration can provide more valuable results. For instance,
in their retrospective analysis of the impact of a past PD project
on a group of participants, Bossen and colleagues understood par-
ticipants’ frustration coming from the conclusion of such project.
As participants are crucial to PD, there is both the practical stake
of avoiding to disappoint them, and the ethical challenge about
satisfying participants’ expectations to be met [
5
]. The pragmatic
value of sustaining PD practice during and after the time frame of
PD projects is reiterated in [
21
] and [
17
], respectively. In the former,
Hertzum and Simonsen propose a method for IT development to
improve the sustainability of the process, and thus solving the chal-
lenge of ensuring valuable end-users feedback in all stages of IT
design and development. The method vouches for a more ecient
participatory process by shifting the focus of attention from system
specications to the eects to be achieved by users through sys-
tem adoption. Ultimately, this also makes the system development
process able to encompass design-in-use. This latter characteristic
is also relevant in other contexts. For instance, when aiming at
sustaining PD practice in dicult cases of urban design, where
participation of marginalized groups is challenging, yet needed. In
[
1
], an infrastructuring process promoting appropriation through
design-in-use of public spaces is suggested as an approach to make
PD interventions more durable even in these dicult contexts.
However, there are also articles that reect on the theoretical
or conceptual aspects that characterize the relationship between
sustainability and PD practice. On one hand Bossen and colleagues
engaged PD scholars in a workshop for reecting on the links
existing among evaluation, sustainability and long-term impacts
and their value for PD. The workshop was driven by the intent to
consolidate awareness and engagement in the community about
fundamental aspects of the practice [
4
]. At another level, Haskel
and Graham provide their perspective on the sustainability of PD
practice by building on their experience with the study of Free
and Open Source Software (FOSS). By focusing on the concept of
infrastructuring they stress how the traits of extensibility, tailorabil-
ity, and maintainability, which are typical of FOSS, well t current
approaches in PD and how synergies among these could greatly
improve the sustainability of PD practice [20].
PDC ’18, August 20–24, 2018, Hasselt and Genk, Belgium G. Poderi and Y. Dirich
4.3 Sustainability of PD Results
This area includes eleven publications that have sustainability as a
fundamental trait of PD intervention outcomes. As a clarication,
we point out that here we found a similar rich diversity about
what counts as a PD result that is described in [
6
]. Indeed, granted
that all articles here are concerned with the achievement of long-
lasting impacts or durable outcomes through PD, they work to
obtain as dierent outcomes as the formation of new consortia
and communities [
18
,
19
] or the strengthening of existing ones
[
9
,
30
], the development of complex IT [
29
] and the consolidation
of participatorily developed processes or practices4[22, 26].
More than in the previous two areas, here it is possible to iden-
tify a set of recurring themes that cross-cut most of the articles:
sense of ownership, mutual learning, and the emergence of skills
or expertise are all considered interrelated, practical implications
of the use of PD that are useful to achieve a sustainable outcome.
In short, by means of involvement in the actual making of, for in-
stance, organizational change or IT design, people develop a sense
of attachment, commitment and empathy – sense of ownership
towards the success and consolidation of their endeavors. Similarly,
mutual learning emerges when actors are encouraged to bring their
perspectives, needs, and expectations into the participatory process
and confront them with the ones raised by other stakeholders. The
same process can also facilitate the emergence of skills and expertise.
Indeed, by opening up spaces for realignment of responsibilities,
activities and new objectives, participants tend to put into use a
series of skills or expertise that are often neglected in their daily
context or work. All these aspects, resulting from the adoption of
PD approaches, contribute to the creation of a more sustainable
outcome.
Finally, several papers refer to infrastructuring, design-in-use
and end-users development as conceptual frame to improve the
sustainability of the outcome by means of PD.
5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
Relevant aspects have emerged from this exploratory work, which
set out to provide a preliminary inquiry of the relationship between
PD and sustainability, broadly understood.
At a general level, although PD scholars address the topic with
the whole range of PDC publication types, from full research papers
to workshop proposals, the theme is treated mainly at the level
of exploratory research; and, as it emerged from the review, the
topic has a role that is central for the paper objectives only for
half of the articles, while it is contextual for most of the remaining
ones. Furthermore, the pervasive lack of a concrete, explicit, and
operational connotation of what “sustainability” means is a relevant
nding of this paper.
We did not expect PD scholars to dene the boundaries of such a
complex and multi-faceted concept, whose meaning and denition
are also debated within the boundaries of sustainability sciences.
However, we consider benecial and valuable that those who en-
gage with the topic do lay out their explicit denition and inter-
pretation of sustainability. This would make easier, for instance, to
position the relationship of the topic with the various principles,
approaches and methods in PD; to perform retrospective analyses
4The targeted practices here are other than PD ones.
of PD interventions that target sustainability; or to compare dif-
ferent interpretations of the concept that can emerge among the
many application domains of PD.
At a substantial level, three distinct, yet potentially overlapping,
use patterns of the concept seem to emerge. These may be indicative
of emerging areas of interest for PD scholars: (1) PD as the method
or approach, which can be used to meet the challenges set forward
by other elds (PD4S); (2) the second area is characterized by the
concern of making the work-in-practice of participatory design-
ers more sustainable (SPDP); and (3) the last group is concerned
with the achievement of sustainable outcomes that can be obtained
thanks to PD (SPDR).
Finally, at a conceptual level, a few constructs stood out more
than others. Infrastructuring, understood as the process of aligning
of social, technical, cultural elements for a given purpose, is used
in several articles to conceptualize both the sustainability of PD
practice and PD outcomes. Similarly, design-in-use and EUD con-
ceptualize the means to empower people to evolve parts of their
technical infrastructure by means of tailoring and customization
and to nurture their sense of ownership towards such infrastructure.
Taken together, these concepts allow us to square the circle and
to abstract our reading of the literature review results further: in-
frastructuring the conditions for design-in-use and/or of end-users
development can foster sense of ownership, mutual learning and
the emergence of latent skills and, therefore, support sustainabil-
ity. Therefore, we propose to dene sustainability as the durability
of alignments among the social and technical dimensions of PD
processes, or PD outcomes, independently from and/or after the
involvement and active intervention of an external participatory
designer or researcher. As such, this broad denition can ideally
support PD in any of the three identied areas.
Given the scope of this exploratory paper, it is important to
highlight some of its limitations. First, the results presented here
primarily reect a reading at the structural and formal levels of the
papers. They do not say much at the substantive level related to,
for instance, theories and methodologies used for understanding
and tackling sustainability. Second, relying exclusively on PDC
proceedings could provide a distorted picture of the eld, because
PD scholars also target other conference venues or journals. Further
research is needed to mitigate these limitations. More importantly, it
is needed to understand how sustainability ts conceptually among
the various theoretical and methodological underpinnings of PD
and how it can be concretely studied, tackled, and assessed.
Regardless of these limitations, we believe that the ndings of
this exploratory paper can support PD scholars in conceptualizing
sustainability and in positioning their works in relation to it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work is supported by the EU/H2020-MSCA-IF-2016 funding
programme, under Grant n.: 749353.
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... Os autores descreveram alguns exemplos de domínios de software (e.g., assistência de saúde e mídias sociais), contribuições teóricas (e.g., desenvolvimento guiado por efeitos e entrevista estética) e métodos (e.g., personas e clipe de experiência) associados ao DP. Posteriormente, Poderi e Dittrich analisaram também artigos publicados nas PDC até o ano de 2016 com objetivo de mapear como a sustentabilidadeé abordada em DP nas perspectivas de DP para sustentabilidade, sustentabilidade das práticas de DP e sustentabilidade dos resultados de DP [Poderi and Dittrich 2018]. Embora esses dois artigos relatem a identificação de frameworks como uma contribuição para aárea de DP, os artigos originais que descrevem esses frameworks não são citados nas revisões ou materiais de apoio. ...
Conference Paper
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Software apoiam uma variedade de tarefas no domínio educacional. Devem atender a requisitos de qualidade, assim como promover boas experiências aos seus usuários. O Design Participativo (DP), integrado à Engenharia de Software (ES), tem o potencial de contemplar as experiências e as necessidades dos usuários finais no desenvolvimento de software com foco na qualidade. Pergunta-se: Como está a integração do DP à ES no desenvolvimento de software para esse domínio? Ao investigar essa questão, a partir de uma revisão sistematizada, constatou-se haver espaço para a proposição de um framework que oriente profissionais de Engenharia de Software na adoção do DP no desenvolvimento de software para o domínio educacional.
... Moving beyond the simple inclusion of sustainability in initial planning, our objective is to explore the possible connections between citizen engagement and the development of sustainable projects. Ensuring the sustainability of participatory design projects is crucial not only during the initial stages but also throughout the entire project life-cycle to guarantee long-term success and real impact on communities [17]. The ultimate goal should be for communities to become fully independent, no longer needing facilitators in these ventures. ...
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Participatory design initiatives, especially within the realm of digital civics, are often integrated and co-developed with the very citizens and communities they intend to assist. Digital civics research aims to create positive social change using a variety of digital technologies. These research projects commonly adopt various embedded processes, such as commissioning models \cite{dcitizensproj22}. Despite the adoption of this process within a range of domains, there isn't currently a framework for best practices and accountability procedures to ensure we engage with citizens ethically and ensure the sustainability of our projects. This workshop aims to provide a space to start collaboratively constructing a dynamic framework of best practices, laying the groundwork for the future of sustainable embedded research processes. The overarching goal is to foster discussions and share insights that contribute to developing effective practices, ensuring the longevity and impact of participatory digital civics projects.
... In parallel, community-based PD [15,21] and socially engaged HCI research, such as Digital Civics [10,11], have grappled with the phenomenon that interactive systems designed for and with communities can remain short-lived. Sustainability in this context usually means that interventions or innovations are maintained, scaled, replicated, or evolving [15]. ...
... Scaling considers long-term processes and impacts on communities (Smith et al. 2020). Sustainability in PD requires a sense of ownership, mutual learning, and skills and expertise among the participants (Poderi and Dittrich 2018). Sustainability of gender equality work also requires a longer temporal orientation to the future, sense of ownership, mutual learning, and competence development within HEIs. ...
... For the wider adoption of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies, it might be necessary to redesign the underlying sector so that it naturally attracts a greater diversity of people and provides more balanced basis for policy and technology design and adoption (see also Johnson, O. W. et al, 2020;Kashar, 2019). As proposed by (Dick et al., 2012;Poderi & Dittrich, 2018) for example participatory design can be used as the method and approach to meet this challenge by involving diverse user groups in the design of energy technologies, thereby empowering people and nurturing their sense of ownership towards energy transition. Besides empowering and engaging users, involving all potential user groups in design process may create new relationships among the actors involved (Capaccioli et al., 2016). ...
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Home energy technologies, such as smart home energy management systems (SHEMS), are important in reducing energy-related emissions and empowering energy users. However, there are concerns on gender inclusiveness of the adoption and use of SHEMS. So far, information systems research has failed to address this significant challenge. This study examines factors shaping gendered adoption and use of smart home technologies, particularly SHEMS, and the implications this has for sustainability and energy equality. Applying a critical lens, we examine findings from a sensory ethnographic study on the adoption of SHEMS in households. The findings underline the need for more inclusive energy technology design, more understanding of diversity of households and more variety in the approaches for increasing awareness on and facilitating the adoption of energy technologies. We contribute to research on gender and home energy technologies, and to the larger discussion of gender and energy.
... Poderi and Dittrich believe that "really existing" cultures are more accurately conceived of as a salad of analytic shreds and patches than a coherent totality. Therefore, we can study them step by step, by first focusing on one relevant aspect of culture at a time, and then examining sequentially other cultural forms, and finally assembling these specific accounts into a narrative that also reflects the actual degree of cultural coherence manifested in the question [38]. ...
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With the rise of the circular economy, recycling, and upcycling is an emerging sustainable system in the fashion industry, emphasising a closed loop of “design, produce, use, and recycle”. In this context, this paper will explore community-based approaches to scale up clothing reuse and upcycling under a social innovation perspective. This study aims to establish community-based practice models, which contribute toward promoting a greater understanding of sustainable fashion and achieving collaborative cocreation frameworks for community stakeholders. This paper, therefore, takes a social innovation perspective to conduct design studies helping with the technical (problem-solving) and cultural (sense-making) barriers that clothing reuse and upcycling face. The research was conducted in the context of the Shanghai community, and a large amount of first-hand research data were obtained through field research, expert and user interviews, and participatory workshops. Finally, this research establishes a platform proposal which combines strategic service design and practical toolkit design. It is a new community-based service model highlighting a significant advancement in the degree of collaboration and cocreation in traditional community service models. Additionally, it dramatically demonstrates the potential of socially innovative design thinking in promoting circular fashion and the closed-loop fashion system.
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The project aims at developing an approach using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) from a participatory perspective to enhance the craft of embroidery. To achieve this goal we propose a design process that encompasses the craft of embroidery as an expression of caring practices aimed at building self-knowledge. The project has been developed with a group of women embroiderers in Cartago, Valle, Colombia. It employs a plural and participatory approach involving an intercultural dialogue among the community of embroiderers, entrepreneurs, designers and experts in the social development of ICTs. ICTs can be understood as tools that are used to make the material conditions and the core skills involved in embroidery more visible to admirers of the craft and to people who are unfamiliar with the technique. We propose using a participatory design approach for social innovation to increase the capacity of people pursing a common goal that strengthens them as a community, reinforcing the collective and ensuring the sustainability of social enterprises.
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Increasingly many Participatory Design (PD) researchers and practitioners engage in urban and public contexts, which surely are about participation and democracy, but not necessarily with a main focus on technology development. These engagements are often a part of dealing with complex societal challenges such as sustainability. Today, many different but partly overlapping denominations are used to capture these participatory practices such as: community-based PD, emerging publics, design for sharing, commons and commoning, transition and transformation design, public and social innovation, PD and urban living labs, etc. As a group of PD researchers, the "Boundary Brigade", we have engaged in this kind of work for soon a decade. At this dialogue-based hands-on workshop, we invite others with similar interests in further articulating: (1) what characterizes applying a PD approach in urban and public contexts, (2) how to understand "urban" + PD, (3) lastly, whether it is fruitful to articulate, as a more overarching concept, the (sub)domain of Urban Participatory Design. Practically we will do this through collaborative mappings with cut-ups of "personal positions", discussions and by co-producing arguments as video stories.
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In this paper we link Participatory Design (PD) to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) via Infrastructuring. We describe the characteristics of FOSS focusing on extensibility, generativity and their communities of practice. We discuss how FOSS products and communities provide valuable resources to PD projects beyond the design phase. We use evidence from our long-running, community based PD project to show how FOSS provides essential elements of infrastructure that contribute to the sustainability of this project and suggest that the mutual learning outcomes of PD, together with FOSS resources, can support users' participation after design. We contribute to PD by providing a point of view from developers and facilitators, who combine FOSS and PD, that furthers an understanding of how these two areas are related.
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What are your capabilities? How do you imagine a workstation where you can apply these capabilities? Where is it situated? These are some of the questions addressed by De Andere Markt (DAM), a Living Lab in the city of Genk. Via the Participatory Design (PD) of semi-fictional 'workstations', we research and design the future of work together with local citizens, public and private organisations and our international network of researchers. The findings, methods, tools and artefacts are made public and open source. This allows to transfer them to other projects, locations and times, as a means of supporting a broader, sustainable and informed debate on 'work'. In an age of participation, many local initiatives have developed their own situated approaches to deal with issues. Our exhibition and workshop wants to constructively contribute to the debate on the values and ways of transferring these types of local initiatives to different groups in the city and other projects in different contexts, locations and times.
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Thanks to renewable energies the decentralized energy system model is becoming more relevant in the production and distribution of energy. The scenario is important in order to achieve a successful energy transition. This paper presents a reflection on the ongoing experience of infrastructuring a socio- technical system in which local communities can manage renewable energies as a Common Pool Resources. We explore how to create a space for citizens’ participation in a continuous process of design for energy management. Objectives of the paper are: i) to clarify how Participatory Design could support the sustainability and the effectiveness of an alternative, ii) to present an experimentation with renewable energy as CPR as an alternative model to the actual vision of the energy system. Preliminary results reported in this paper suggest that a Participatory Design process can be valuable for communities in order to establish new energy management models.
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In this paper we discuss what the result of a Participatory Design (PD) process is and how it can be described and evaluated. We look at several PD projects and discuss if they have a participatory result and how we know that it is participatory. We also ask if the users recognize their contribution, and if the designers have to 'take side'. We also identify impediments to achieving a participatory result, looking at issues like: conflicting views that are difficult to voice, issues that are difficult to negotiate, how real-life complexities cannot be addressed in the project (or by the artifact). These issues are linked to earlier discussions on power and politics in PD. We conclude that achieving a participatory design result is important in PD and gives meaning and direction to PD processes.
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Sustaining participation in design is difficult, especially in neighborhoods that seek change consistent with their cultural values. Participatory Design offers several approaches (e.g. infrastructuring) that help to balance the sensibilities of urban planning with the immediacies of design. This paper investigates the distinctive value of a "constellation" of participatory activities that sustained engagement throughout the design of an urban plaza, combining physical and digital flows. Based on a three-year collaboration in a historically black South LA neighborhood, this study analyzes the re-invention of urban furniture – payphones, bus benches, newspaper boxes, planters, and public displays – into community interactions. After reviewing the concrete vision of this constellation, the City of Los Angeles decided to fund the implementation of a pedestrian plaza. This paper articulates our methods of infrastructuring, providing techniques that sustain participation over time around physical urban objects that become touch points for fluid groups of designers. More than any one design, the constellation approach provides a platform for horizontal iteration, maintaining focus and participation in imagining a neighborhood's socio-technical future.
Conference Paper
This case study describes the development of Hublink, a case management system developed during 2013 and now in use by 9 Third Sector organisations in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, UK. Participatory Design offered ways to deliver this project that was consistent with the social values and resource constraints of the partner organisations. In this case study, the use of Open Source Software together with Participatory Design contribute to enable long-term sustainable ownership, ongoing customisation and flexible use of the technology in the community context.
Conference Paper
This short paper outlines the background and prospects for a potential research agenda of Participatory Design (PD) in the area of collaborative transnational rule-making on global sustainability concerns. The paper adopts a pragmatic approach to interdisciplinary work, identifying new opportunities for PD by pointing to social science oriented processes that may be strengthened by the theory and practice of PD. With a theoretical foundation in legal philosophy on legitimacy and steps towards a deliberative democratic evolution of norms of conduct for global concerns, the paper is concerned with opportunities to involve a global citizenry in the evolution of norms of conduct that may affect the lives and futures of individuals. The paper describes research potential for PD towards enhancing information technology assisted inclusion of views, needs and concerns of individuals in transnational rule-making. It does so by drawing on the process that led to the 2011 United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. This process exemplifies challenges in collaborative and inclusive global rule-making that that may be assisted by increased and informed deployment of IT in order to enhance broad and balanced participation in the rule-making process.
Conference Paper
This paper evaluates how the 'thick' documentation format Make-and-tell supports generative participation in a sustainable design project 'Haspenwood'. Generative participation refers to the possibility for participants to elaborate on the design after project completion. We frame thick documentation as representing the immaterial backstory of a project, next to its material aspects. Paying attention to thick documentation in a design process, can contribute to defining generativity in sustainable design projects beyond its material challenges (e.g. reuse of resources), but also as an immaterial process wherein a continuous participatory shaping of values takes place (Whal and Baxter, 2008). This article describes how we developed and evaluated tactics (Schoffelen & Huybrechts, 2013) to support designers in producing and evaluating thick documentation approaches throughout design projects in the context of documenting 'Haspenwood'.