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Volume 2, Issue 2, pp 59-84
Copyright ©2022 Victor Udoewa
https://doi.org/10.47061/jasc.v2i2.3816
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Peer Review Article
Radical Participatory Design:
Awareness of Participation
Victor Udoewa
Chief Experience Officer and Service Design Lead in the NASA Small Business
Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) Program
udoewa@gmail.com
Abstract
Design has been a massive failure. It has functioned in the service of industry and
capitalism, leaving us a world with several crises which we are failing to resolve. The
onto-epistemic framework out of which this type of design injustice emerges is
coloniality, highlighting a trans-locally experienced truth: our ontologies are our
epistemologies. And our onto-epistemologies are our namologies–studies,
perspectives, types, or ways of designing. If we instead embody an onto-epistemic
framework of relationality, our design process becomes radically participatory.
Radical Participatory Design (RPD) is meta-methodology that is participatory to the
root or core. Using the models “designer as community member,” “community
member as designer,” and “community member as facilitator,” RPD prioritizes
relational, cultural, and spiritual knowledge, as well as lived experiential knowledge,
over mainstream, institutional knowledge. Based on the experiential knowledge of
employing radical participatory design over many years, we have induced a
characteristic definition of RPD. Through an awareness of participation, we discuss
the various benefits of RPD including genuine inclusion, true human-centeredness,
moving beyond human-centeredness, embedded empathy, trauma-responsive design,
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and systemic action. We discuss the ethics of Radical Participatory design from both
an equality and equity perspective. We offer ways of evaluating the success of the
radically participatory design process. Lastly, we discuss the barriers and ways we
have overcome them in our projects.
Keywords
participatory design, participatory research, decolonizing design, research
justice, design justice, critical design, (relational) action research, relational
ontology, relational epistemology, community-based action research, action
research
Introduction
As a human animal, a part of nature, I inhabit multiple spaces of privilege and
lack of privilege. I am a cisgender, heterosexual, Christian, male, U.S. American
human. Simultaneously, I am a Black, disabled Nigerian in the U.S. from an
immigrant family. I am a member of the indigenous Ibibio people group, and my
name, Anietie, is a shortened version of the phrase “Who is like God?” When I
write, I tend to write from a perspective of African indigeneity, different from
indigenous perspectives in the Americas or Australia. There are many other
parts of my background that place me in positions of privilege or disadvantage—
country of residence, education, income, etc. Many of those have changed
throughout my life.
One influential privilege I hold is the position of designer. I have practiced
design in communities around the world. Despite my highest hopes, design has
not risen to the challenge of resolving our current, growing crises. We face an
economic crisis locking some people, groups, and nations in cycles of poverty with
fewer people controlling greater shares of the wealth; a climate and
environmental crisis of ever worsening ecocidal devastation; a conflict crisis
where entrenched casteism, xenophobia, jingoism, and ethnocentrism fuel
ongoing disputes; and a spiritual crisis where none of our best faith traditions
have been able to address any of the previous three crises. This crisis-bound
world is a world of our monohumanistic design, creating a one-world world, in
the service of industry and capitalism (Escobar, 2018; Law, 2015; Wynter, 2003;
Wynter & McKittrick, 2015).
Awareness-based system change agents recognize that we cannot solve our
crises only with external methods, or methods focused on creating change outside
of ourselves. We must pay attention and nurture our inner life and interiority
that provide the source conditions fueling our actions (Scharmer, 2009).
However, it is not enough to do this on an individual level. It is difficult for social
change to happen if I only nurture my interiority and no one else does, or if we
each do it individually. We must also pay attention and nurture our communal
interiority, directing our collective decision-making and actions. Participatory
design (PD) attempts to focus on communal interiority. Instead of focusing on the
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external methods, methodologies, or what we do, it focuses on how we do what
we do, the interior dynamics, ecology, and positionality of a living community.
If design has failed at creating a pluralistic, flourishing world, PD has
experienced a type of stillbirth, never truly beginning to bring about the
emancipatory democracy promised as one of its goals (Geppert & Forlano, 2022),
struggling to rid itself from its inherent coloniality (Cooke & Kothari, 2001). This
makes sense as our namologies—studies, types, or ways of designing—are simply
a reflection of our ways of knowing which are a reflection of our ways of being
(Ibibio, Generations). Our ontologies are our epistemologies and our onto-
epistemologies are our namologies. Thus, there is a need to decolonize
decolonization, or more specifically, decolonize PD. By embodying an onto-
epistemic framework of relationality, the design process can become radically
participatory. To embody relationality, designers need an awareness of
participation, and, from awareness, can take action.
The first purpose of this paper is to go beyond critique, to decolonize and
refuture PD. Secondly, I aim to holistically describe the PD I have experienced,
as many PD researchers and writers do not often explain fully how, when, and
what PD was implemented on a project. Third, through a holistic description, I
want to place the PD I have experienced in comparison and conversation with
what others mean or practice when they use the term PD. Lastly, I hope to
encourage participatory designers to go further, fully radicalizing participation
while encouraging non-participatory designers to begin the PD journey with a
radical approach or goal. Communities, the people for whom professional
designers design or the people who will use what is being designed, can and have
always practiced radical versions of PD without professional designers. The
problem occurs with the colonizing presence of professional designers. This paper
presents not just insights but expertise from community practice that is not
synthesized through mainstream, academic, institutional knowledge-based
understandings of research rigor, but through indigenous, practical synthesis
which is incarnationally and relationally codified by traditionalizing certain
community practices and discarding other community practice, utilizing learning
circles, storytelling, oral histories, art, ceremony, and more (Ellison, 2014; Smith,
2021; Suaalii-Sauni & Fulu-Aiolupotea, 2014).
In the rest of the paper, I share an awareness of the typology of participation
and a description of Radical Participatory Design (RPD), the participatory meta-
methodology this paper describes. Different from a methodology which is a
collection of methods or guiding philosophies or principles that help one to choose
a method at a particular point in a process, a meta-methodology is a way of doing
a methodology, an approach or orientation that can be used with any
methodology. Because RPD teams tend to gravitate towards certain
methodologies over others, it can be considered an approach, orientation, or
philosophy that guides one in choosing a particular methodology.
After introducing RPD, I discuss the ethics of RPD focusing on remuneration
through the lens of equality and equity, dissemination of knowledge, and
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community accountability. I then discuss the evaluation of RPD to determine if
the process was truly and critically radically participatory. This is helpful due to
the invisibility of coloniality that may lead us to believe we, design team
members, are practicing RPD when we are practicing colonial participatory
design (CPD), conventional participatory design in which designers lead the
process and participation is not fully through the design process. Next, I discuss
the benefits of RPD, how it opens up pathways to other types of design such as
society-centered, futures, systems, or planet-centered design. I share how it
relates to empathy, comparing it to other design awareness-based systems
change practices. I then discuss the difficulties of practicing RPD and provide
tips to minimize the difficulties based on experiential knowledge. Lastly, I
provide insights on addressing and overcoming organizational barriers to the
practice of RPD.
The Awareness and Typology of Participation
To compare various PD practices, I use a typology of participation based on three
spectra or questions (Figure 1). Who initiates? Who participates? Who leads?
There is a temporal distinction between initiation, on one hand, and
participation and leadership, on the other hand. Even though initiation only
occurs at the beginning of a project while participation and leadership occur
throughout, the effects of initiation can be experienced throughout the project,
and initiation can even affect participation and leadership.
On the spectra, I locate: community design when only the community is
involved; community-driven design when the community may invite professional
designers for at least a little help, up to equal participation; CPD where
designers fully lead and participate, never reaching equitable leadership with the
community; and RPD in which the community fully or equally participates and
fully or equitably leads. Visualizations for each type of design can be viewed
elsewhere (Udoewa, 2022b in press). Radical comes from the Latin word “radix”
meaning root. Radical Participatory Design is a design that is participatory to
the root, all the way down, from top to bottom, beginning to end.
Thus I introduce Radical Participatory Design as having three defining
characteristics.
1. Community members are full, equal members of the
research and design team from the beginning of the project
to the end. There are no design team meetings,
communications, and planning apart from community
members. They are always there at every step and between
steps because they are full and equal design team members.
Communities are not homogenous. In RPD, we, the design team members, form
qualitatively representative samples of the community in a way that honors
cultural understandings of leadership and participation. We also drop designer-
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dominated notions of time, and move at the pace of community relationships,
availability, and desire.
Figure 1: Three axes of participation: initiation, participation, and leadership.
2. Community members outnumber non-community,
professional designers on the design team.
When a person is both a community member and designer, and she leads the
process, choosing methodologies, she is practicing CPD. In RPD, when a person is
both a designer and community member, she primarily embodies the community
member role, offering design skills alongside all other community skills, while
the community facilitates and leads the process. Because an organization may
refuse to implement community ideas or prototypes during a PD project, there is
a third characteristic.
3. Community members retain and maintain accountability,
leadership, and ownership of design outcomes and
narratives about the design artifacts and work.
Characteristic 2 is a guideline, not a requirement. However, RPD projects
tend to be more successful when they embody that characteristic. The goal of
RPD is transformational justice, though RPD retains the benefits of
multidirectional learning, inclusion of community perspectives, better design
outcomes, and increased ownership over the outcomes.
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In RPD, professional designers do not empower since empowering reinforces
the hierarchy participatory designers seek to subvert with PD. Instead, in RPD,
professional designers divest of power, and the community assumes it. The RPD
process naturally becomes an educational one in which learning is embedded in
every phase and activity, not just in research phases, due to the experiential,
cultural, and spiritual knowledge the community embodies and their presence at
every step in the process. Unlike research justice which views experiential,
mainstream institutional, and cultural/spiritual knowledge as equal, RPD views
experiential, cultural, spiritual, and embodied knowledge as greater or more
important than mainstream institutional knowledge for system change.
Instead of the “designer as facilitator” model, we, RPD team members, move
to a model of “community member as facilitator,” “designer as community
member,” “community member as designer.” “Community member as designer”
means they are full-members of the team, researching and designing.
“Community member as facilitator” recognizes that no matter how much
designers try to neutralize our facilitation work, facilitation is power, and the
power should be wielded and held by the community on whose behalf we are
designing. So community members facilitate the process. Lastly, “designer as
community member” signifies that the designer sits equal to and alongside all
the other community members on the team, offering her skills (design and
research) as equal to and alongside all other skills, assets, talents, and gifts of all
other community members.
Through these models, RPD creates suspended space with an alternate social
field. A social field is the structure of the social relationships between individuals,
groups, organizations, and systems (Scharmer, 2009). Suspended space is a space
where the social rules, norms, and relationships, governed by the larger society,
are suspended in the subset space or small-group space within the society (Rollins,
2006). Because those social norms, rules, and relationships are different, an
alternate social (sub)field emerges. Radical Participatory Design creates an
alternate social field which aims to move across 3 stages. In the first stage,
intrapenetration, the colonial logics of the macro-social field of the societal system
naturally enter into the micro-social field of the design process. In the second
stage, interpenetration, the micro-social field of the design process also begins to
affect the macro-social field of the system and some of the new relationships held
or suspended in the design process begin to carry over into societal interactions
outside the design process. In the last stage, extrapenetration, only the design
process’s social field is affecting the larger system’s social field. The more RPD is
practiced the longer the design team is able to sustain the suspended space
naturally outside the design process or in other projects.
There is still more work to do to decolonize awareness-based systems change
methods which are not yet or not necessarily radically participatory. The MAPA
innovation lab (Sbardelini et al., 2022), social field action research (Pomeroy et al.,
2021; Wilson, 2021), systemic constellations (Ritter & Zamierowski, 2021), and
social field pattern development, including social presencing theater work
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(Gonçalves & Hayashi, 2021), still maintain a difference between participants and
researchers, researchers who planned or analyzed alone or chose methodologies for
participants. Even Global Social Witnessing (GSW), a contemplative social
cognition practice that facilitates mindful witnessing of critical events, is not
necessarily participatory and can even be done alone without a community
(Matoba, 2021).
Ethics of Radical Participatory Design
In order to explicate the ethics, evaluation, and benefits of RPD, I will highlight
two projects specifically, while mentioning others. The first was a digital literacy
project done under the auspices of a multinational technology company. It was a
special project for a vice-president (VP) who wanted a global certification with
multiple tracks—a system admin/devOps track, a mobile and web application
development track, and a digital literacy track. I will focus on the digital literacy
track. Three times, the project failed to reach not just literacy targets but even
registration targets. The VP left the organization, and the project lead moved to
another project. I was allowed to run the project in any way I chose with the
budget. I recruited a team of 12 people mostly from north, central India and
participated in an RPD experience to redesign the educational service in a way
that would improve digital literacy levels in north-central India to start before
expanding to other regions (Udoewa et al., 2016; Udoewa et al., 2017). The digital
literacy project is an example of a successful RPD project, in which the team
experienced sustained and sustainable shifts in power.
I also participated in the redesign of an international summer service-
learning program for high school students, in which Washington, DC high school
students traveled abroad during the summer doing service-learning projects and
then returned home to complete social entrepreneurship projects in DC (Udoewa,
2018, 2022a). This project was completed under the auspices of a nonprofit in
collaboration with the local DC public schools district (DCPS). The project to
redesign the international summer service-learning program and curriculum is an
example of a failed RPD project due to the program’s refusal to give up power. I
will use both projects to talk about the ethics and evaluation of RPD.
The ethics of general design work apply to RPD, including: confidentiality,
anonymity, data disclosures (what, why, and how long data is collected, and
when it will be destroyed); transparency and communication of the work and
goals; IRB reviews; and research participant referrals when issues come up
beyond the skillset and purpose of the designers including trauma issues, etc.
Informing the community of the progress, status, and outcomes is also important,
though the focus in RPD is informing the wider community since community
members are full members of the design team.
Similar to indigenous methodologies, the community leads and decides not
just what research is done but also if, what, and how research is shared (Smith,
2021). Usually, RPD communities do not have a preference for the written word.
However, when projects are shared in writing, RPD practitioners recognize
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collaborative and community authorship in two ways. First, all community
members who want to co-author a paper can do so (Udoewa et al., 2016; Udoewa,
et al., 2017). Secondly, in non-project papers written alone like this one, I try to
cite cultural and community knowledge as a reference equal to other 3rd-person-
knowing, academic author references, not just as a footnote.
Radical Participatory Design requires the addition of remuneration as an
ethical concern. It is unjust for a designer to be paid for design work while
community members, who are equal designers doing the same work, are unpaid
(equality). The injustice is more apparent when we consider that the designer
does the work as part of the job while community members must do the work in
addition to their normal livelihoods and routines. In cases where community
members are jobless or the RPD work takes community members away from
their jobs, the offense is greater. Because the design work is not the job of the
community member, it costs the community member more to participate in RPD
and therefore they should be paid even more (equity).
In the international summer service-learning project, the student community
members of the design and research team were not paid for their time. It is
possible to say we, the design team, did have equality because the two
professional designers, including myself, were also not paid. However, from the
standpoint of RPD, ethically, it was still poor practice to fail to compensate the
students for their time. Moreover, we did not achieve equity, because failure to
compensate design team members had a bigger impact on the students than the
impact on the professional designers. The project failed ethically from the
standpoint of RPD.
In contrast is the example of a current systems practice RPD project, focused
on generational, racialized trauma in the rural U.S. South, the sponsoring
nonprofit pays team members (professional designer or community designer)
equally according to hours of work. In cases where it is difficult to get approval to
pay community members equitably, there are numerous, creative ways to
compensate community members. In the digital literacy project in India, I paid
for breakfast and lunch each day, a few dinners when it was late in the day, all
equipment needed, all travel expenses to work locations, and full room and board
for overnight travel and experiential homestay research. I gave references,
referrals, recommendations, and certificates of completion to team members to
use in job hunting, made the project an internship for resumes, and encouraged
team members to publish our work so that they became published authors of two
papers.
Community review boards (CRBs) are not a replacement for participation or
leadership by the community. They can provide an extra check to prevent
unethical, unsafe, inequitable, exclusive research or design from being
implemented. Still it is possible for a CRB to become a gatekeeper, setting up a
hierarchy filled with the same logics of coloniality. For CRBs to work well, they
must be radically participatory and radically representative, like an RPD team.
However, they are not a requirement, as an RPD project brings the ethical
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community checks into the actual research and design process due to the
presence of community members. Most RPD projects do not use them.
Evaluation of Radical Participatory Design Processes
The examples of remuneration hint at the way to evaluate the success of the RPD
process, which is distinct from the success of the design outcome (Drain et al.,
2021). An RPD process is successful when a majority of the community designers
on the design team experience a sustained and sustainable shift in power. The
purpose and goal of RPD is transformation and power exchange. If the power
exchange does not occur or is not sustained beyond the work, the RPD process
was not successful.
In the international summer service-learning program, I formed an RPD
team with students in the program (2018). Though the project had all three RPD
characteristics, the organization who initiated the project switched the project to
a CPD project when they rejected the student designers' decisions and would not
implement them. The students left the experience discouraged, with the same
amount of power they had at the beginning of the project. Nothing changed for
them. The RPD process was not successful, not radically participatory.
My digital literacy project was the opposite (Udoewa et al., 2016; Udoewa et
al., 2017). My organization fully relinquished control and implemented what the
community designers created. The community owned the narratives of the work
and pointed proudly to the outcomes in the news claiming: “We did this. Look
what we did!” As a result of the work, they gained experience that helped five of
seven community members gain a job. A sixth community member, who was
employed, received a promotion. The seventh community member improved his
floral business. All became first time authors with two publications. Additionally,
our team included three non-designers from within our organization who took a
break from their marketing and sales work to do community projects on the
ground. All three employees quit their jobs within a year of the experience to
focus on similar social impact work because they could not go back, divesting of
their power in a multinational company. I did the same. One hundred percent of
team members’ positions of power at the beginning of the project were
transformed and remain that way to this day.
Some of these examples of transformational power exchanges are still within
the system of values of those with power, leaving the system unchanged. For
example, publishing in a peer-reviewed journal is an achievement that conveys
authority and increased power in our current social hierarchy. However, research
justice tells us that experiential and cultural knowledge is just as important as
published, institutional knowledge. The community may or may not value
increased power within an unchanged, oppressive system. Though RPD
designers value and fight for increased representation of underutilized
communities in traditional seats of power like journal authorship, a higher goal
of RPD beyond individual and group power exchanges within the same system is
the creation of alternative systems based on community values; this is the goal of
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pluriversal design. Radical Participatory Design most successfully creates
alternative modes of living in the world. Power exchanges for a majority of
community members on an RPD design team are still a success because such
power exchanges are necessary systemic steps towards pluriversal goals of
alternative systems.
Benefits of Radical Participatory Design
The benefits of RPD include more successful and effective design outcomes,
mutual learning, and power exchanges. Additionally, community members
conduct research among other community members. When doing interviews or
observation, the familiar community faces help to reduce anxiety. Often,
interviewees are more willing to talk and be open with other members of the
community. In cross-cultural design and international design projects when
professional designers speak a different language from the community,
translation is usually needed. In RPD projects, interviews can be conducted in
the primary language of the interviewees because design team members speak
the language. The ultimate benefit of RPD is embedded local, experiential
knowledge in the design team.
Beyond Inclusive and Human Centered Design
Radical participatory design facilitates inclusive design and moves beyond it.
Instead of only including marginalized community members in research
recruitment, RPD places community members as full, equal members of the
research and design team. Designers and community members benefit from
mutual learning, and the community benefits from a design outcome that is
based on their lived, experiential, relational, cultural knowledge. Moving beyond
inclusive design, RPD focuses on an inclusive design team. An inclusive team,
then, aids in inclusive research recruitment because the team can use their
community connections, networks, and lifelong relationships to expedite and
facilitate the recruitment process, reducing anxiety more quickly with research
participants who recognize the researchers and designers as people from their
own community. In the digital literacy project, the design team did not need
translators and could go into communities and immediately reduce anxiety by
using the local language and building on networks, connections, and
relationships the design team members already had (Udoewa et al., 2016;
Udoewa et al., 2017). In RPD, the community benefits from better design
outcomes due to the inclusion and greater willingness of research participants to
offer experiential knowledge and expertise.
The only way to truly achieve a Human-centered Design (HCD) process is
through RPD. Human-centered design is a methodology that centers every part
of the design process on the community for whom designers are designing. When
doing design injustice or CPD, there may be an activity or a phase centered on
the community, but the process always moves back to a phase or activity or
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interactivity work that is not centered on and apart from the community. In an
RPD process, every activity of every phase, including interactivity work, is
centered on the community because the community is always there, co-leading
the design work, driving it forward, and often initiating the work. In cases when
the community does not initiate the work, it can still be an RPD approach if the
professional designers, who initiate, give up control and power and the
community both participates and assumes leadership including leadership that
has the power to stop the project.
Ultimately, when conducting RPD, it is common to move away from HCD
towards society-centered, community-centered, life-centered, or planet-centered
design, methodologies centered on society, community, all life, and the planet at
every phase in the process. If a community is truly centered in a design process
so radically that they are full-fledged, equal, and equitable team members, then
their expertise and desires lead the process. When their expertise leads the
process their expertise brings out two dynamics. First, due to the relational
nature of existence, to truly care for a group of humans, one must care for the
entire ecosystem that nourishes those humans, an ecosystem in which those
humans sit. Second, communities care about more than human individuals. They
care about their community, society, land stewardship, water resource
stewardship systems, etc. Centering the community means centering the cares
and priorities of the community which naturally broadens design.
Such a shift benefits not just a specific group, as in HCD, but rather an
entire community, society, non-human life like animals and plants, and
ecosystems including non-living things such as rivers. Ultimately communities
benefit because they have healthier environments and ecosystems, and the
design team benefits from learning how to design eco-systematically, relationally,
and holistically. Communities near the bottom of social hierarchies tend to be
more in tune with the system in which they sit and the various competing needs
of both life and non-life in the environment (Gurung, 2020). They bring that
knowledge into the process. For example, in a translocal, community design
project on water, the community chose this challenge: Ensure a safe, sustainable,
equitable, and affordable drinking water future (Roberts, 2017). This design
challenge is not anthropocentric, but life-centered. In a current, local, community
project where we, the design team, are designing a racially just school
community, in addition to human needs, we are looking at the building needs,
plant needs, compost needs, and more.
One principle of feminist standpoint theory is that people at the bottom of a
social hierarchy tend to have a more accurate or holistic picture of reality
(Gurung, 2020), which oppressed communities have always known. Since
awareness-based methods entered design through Liberatory Design, Equity-
centered Design, and more, reflective activities have been added to design
processes (Anaissie et al., 2021; Creative Reaction Lab, 2018). However, the focus
of awareness-based methods is on people higher in the social hierarchy who do
not see parts of the system due to their location in the social field and system.
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The awareness of the field is generally more communally known to groups at the
bottom of the social hierarchy. Instead of expending so much energy to encourage
powerful people to reflect on their positionality and the field dynamics, becoming
reflexive but not necessarily reflexible—moving towards flexible change—it can
be more efficient to simply engage in RPD, shifting the leadership and
participation spectra to the community and letting awareness result as a product
of the process (Arnold & Schön, 2021).
In contrast to general needs-based design injustice methodologies, RPD
brings the benefit of pluriversal design and futures design. Futures design can be
considered an asset based approach where the aspirational asset is the shared
vision of the future. Pluriversal design seeks to create alternative and multiple
modes and ways of being and living in the world according to the values and
identities of various communities (Escobar, 2018; Leitão, 2020). Pluriversal
design is “a desire-based approach” that opens up the pluriverse, a multiplicity of
possibilities, or a world of many worlds which can all be good and different
(Escobar, 2018; Leitão, 2020). It is much harder to move from a damage-centered
or conventional needs-based approach to a pluriversal, desire-based approach or
a future vision, asset-based approach when the community’s desires and vision of
the future are not represented and voiced in every activity, phase, and
interactivity moment of planning and decision-making.
Radical Participatory Design provides a platform to converge the desires and
visions of the designers and the desires and visions of the community because of
the power-exchanging models of “community member as designer” and “designer
as community member.” This exchange during RPD allows for the visions,
desires, values, expertise, and identities of the community to be present and
voiced on the design team during the design process, increasing the likelihood
that the design process moves to a pluriversal approach, outcome, and a shared
vision of the future, if the community is truly leading the process. Thus, RPD is
not neutral, but represents a pluriversal bias towards the identities, values,
desires, and shared future visions of the community leading the process. For
example, in the international summer service-learning project, students mapped
out pathways through a future program, not based on problems they
experienced, but based on who they wanted to be and what they wanted to
become (Udoewa 2018). Thus, in RPD, communities benefit, then, from a design
that embodies their local, specific, future vision. This benefit highlights the
relationship between decolonization, anticolonialism, and postcolonialism.
Decolonization is not the goal. In a postcolonial and neocolonial world,
decolonization is the first step on the anticolonial road to a pluralistic
multiverse—the pluriverse.
Sustained Embodied, Embedded, and Auto-Empathy
One way to hold empathy for community members throughout the entire design
process is through RPD. Empathy is one of the primary mindsets and an ideology
of HCD (Heylighen & Dong, 2019; Kolawole, 2016). Designers try to gain and
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keep empathy by researching with community members and carrying the results
of that research and the community perspectives into the design stage through
qualitative data and design artifacts like personas and empathy maps. But what
is empathy? If empathy is understanding and sharing the feelings of another
person, we may realize that achieving empathy through a generic design
injustice or CPD project is an impossibility.
When viewing empathy through the Global Social Witnessing (GSW)
perspective, there are three stages: the witnessing stage in which the observer
still feels separate, the sensing stage in which the observer experiences empathy
and connectedness with the observed, and the witnessing stage in which the
observer experiences oneness with the observed “through mental, affective, and
bodily responses” (Matoba, 2021). After the GSW practice, the observer hopefully
takes action based on the global empathy gained (Bachen, et al., 2012).
In contrast, Goleman and Ekman identify three components of empathy
(Vlismas, 2020). Cognitive empathy is understanding what someone is
experiencing, but there still is a distance between the empathizer and the subject
of the empathy. Cognitive empathy maps to the observing stage of GSW and the
research stage of HCD. The second component of empathy is emotional empathy.
Emotional empathy is feeling with someone, experiencing the same feelings and
sharing in that experience. The empathizer has now put themself in the same
emotional space as the subject of the empathy, walking alongside the subject
through their emotional journey. Emotional empathy can extend to physical
sensations as well, and maps to the sensing stage of GSW and the synthesis and
define stage of HCD. Lastly, there is compassionate empathy. Compassionate
empathy is being moved to help. It is a balance between cognitive and emotional
empathy, where the empathizer is not overwhelmed and paralyzed by emotion
(emotional empathy) and simultaneously does not immediately jump into
problem solving based on understanding (cognitive empathy). Compassionate
empathy maps to the last witnessing stage of GSW, in which the observer
experiences oneness with the observed through responses, and to the design and
delivery stage of HCD.
When we understand empathy, not as one type or another, but as the
summation, co-mingling, or relation of all empathic components, we know that
empathy is not required for designers to engage in a design injustice or CPD
project. Most designers work with an intellectual understanding of community
members' experiences, and then work to change the situation or design a
solution. It is clear that one component, cognitive empathy, can be temporarily
achieved through research. The difficulty is maintaining the cognitive empathy
initially achieved, and achieving emotional empathy and compassionate
empathy.
In work with experienced senior designers, cognitive bias slips into the
design process blocking cognitive empathy. The further away in time designers
are from the research that informs the design, the less cognitive empathy the
design team has. Cognitive biases even appear directly after research in the
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awareness-based sense-making and synthesis phase, when experienced designers
and design researchers make claims or extract insights that are not based on
patterns but rather the last piece of information they read, the most recent
interview debrief, or one interview, observation, activity, or report that they
remembered quite well. When I ask what data the claim is based on, I discover
that it is scant or not there. Even artifacts, like personas, that are meant to carry
cognitive empathy into later stages of the design process can falter due to various
reasons: irrelevant information included in personas that designers implicitly
and cognitively interpret as important, persona photos or images whose
demographics and physical appearances are erroneously associated with
subcommunity members introducing more bias, obsolete personas which are
incorrectly treated as current because designers do not continuously update
them, and the complete lack of use of a persona in the design process after its
creation as if the simple act of creation is enough to generate empathetic fitness
or empathetic endurance (Farai, 2020). The same analysis can be applied to other
design artifacts like empathy maps, days-in-the-life, etc.
In addition to the fleeting nature of cognitive empathy, it is rare for
designers to create emotional empathy. Because it is not required in the design
process, it is not measured, captured, or evaluated. There may be designers who
achieve it and others who do not. Anecdotally, emotional empathy is rare from
my experience; most designers are referring to cognitive empathy when they use
the term empathy. Additionally, a large barrier to emotional empathy is the lack
of sufficient relational time in the context of the power hierarchy between the
designer and research participant. Though designers could utilize more
longitudinal studies interacting with the same participant over time, most design
studies involve a single interaction with a community member during a research
phase. Compare a single design interview to the repeated interaction over
months that a clinical psychologist or therapist has with a patient. Even in the
therapeutic context, MacNaughton (2009) argues that empathy is impossible due
to the imbalance in the relationship. Over time, the building of relationship and
psychological trust can reduce or temporarily suspend the power imbalance
enough to allow the possibility of empathic transfer; however a single design
research interview is insufficient to achieve this. Another obstacle to emotional
empathy is the lack of experiential research in many projects. It is difficult to
gain emotional empathy through interviews alone without actual experiences.
Simulations and experiential methods like mystery shopping, mystery working,
homestays, participant observation, work-alongs, etc. are much more powerful at
evoking or provoking designers emotionally to move towards emotional empathy
(Stickdorn et al., 2018; Woodcock et al., 2019). However, they are not used as
much as the interview method. Finally, what happens when one has a strong
aversion to the lifestyle or values of the community members one is researching?
One might have cognitive empathy but emotional empathy may be an
impossibility due to conflicting values and worldviews. This situation leads to
critical empathy which is not emotional empathy (de Coning, 2021).
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However, designers do respond to the community needs which would
seemingly qualify as compassionate empathy. The difficulty is that
compassionate empathy is not simply responding to help or acting, it is being
moved to respond to help, and then helping. Compassionate empathy necessarily
requires emotional empathy. Even if emotional empathy were not required, the
motivation for compassionate empathy must be compassion. It is impossible to
achieve this in the case of a professional designer because the financial
incentives, wages, or salary make such compassionate motivation impossible.
With or without compassion, the designer’s job and goal is to act and receive
compensation. Even when designers conduct pro bono or volunteer work, the
framing of the work or the agreement is that the designer will conduct research,
uncover important insights, and create something. This framing or prior
agreement makes compassionate empathy an impossibility. We can never know
if the designer would have been moved to act and then act, outside of an
agreement that dictates they will act.
If not an impossibility, empathy is rare (Macnaughton, 2009; Nathanson,
2003; Watson, 2009). How can we ever truly, experientially know what someone
else is going through (Heylighen & Dong, 2019)? It is much better to avoid the
problem of gaining empathy. For example, in the international summer service-
learning project, instead of the designers building personas to create empathy,
the students built auto-personas of themselves (Udoewa, 2018). Radical
participatory design avoids the problem of gaining empathy by simply embedding
empathy through lived, communal, embodied, cultural, and spiritual experience
and experienced emotional journeys, into the design team for the entirety of the
design process. Instead of relying on transcripts and research artifacts to create
empathy and hold the community needs in the forefront of the minds of the
designers throughout implementation, the presence of community members on
the team brings their lived experience into all conversations, decisions,
explanations, and implementations. That lived experience can check a process,
encourage, cajole, explain, remind, expand, teach, and familiarize. This converts
the design process not only into a power exchange but also an emotional
exchange between team members as the professional designers on the team
relate to, engage with, connect to, and learn from their community member
teammates and designers. Such an empathic exchange benefits communities by
creating a design outcome fully driven by and embedded in their experience.
Designers benefit through mutual learning and the gift of relationship.
Systemic Action
Radical participatory design has a higher likelihood of creating systemic action
or active non-action (refusing to act unjustly) than other awareness-based
methodologies. While awareness-based methodologies and methods can and have
led to some kind of action, two difficulties with action arise. First, in my lived
experience, often they do not lead to action. This is due to the fact that post-
awareness action is always a choice. Similar to the bystander in GSW or the
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“white moderates” to whom Dr. King wrote from prison, a person can become
aware of a situation or the plight of another and choose not to act due to fear,
very high costs, fragility, system-reinforcing punishment of anti-systemic
behavior, etc. (DiAngelo, 2018; King, 2018; Matoba, 2021). There can be a
disconnection and stagnant absencing between the presencing steps of open
heart and open will (Scharmer, 2009). In some situations, people who are aware
of social injustice pretend to be unaware or do not acknowledge it at the
conscious level even when their subconscious knows it to be true (Gilson, 2022;
Pohlhaus, 2012). Pomeroy et al. ask: “what are the methods that best serve
action” as an open question (2021, p. 115). Radical participatory design moves
from awareness to social action; it is a design meta-methodology. Action is often
a result of design processes that implement something. Radical participatory
design goes further because it moves to social action. Cunningham reflects that
awareness-based methodologies “don’t unmake centuries of injustice and violence
by being generative in a room, but [they] do help the social body in the room
become more effective at the thing they are trying to do” (Cunningham, 2021, p.
12). Awareness-based methods are more focused on making people more effective
at the work they are already doing with some level of awareness, while RPD
actually creates new work and actions by the very nature of being a design meta-
methodology. The new work can be considered a trivial outcome because design,
by definition, usually creates new things. Still, any system-oriented design,
especially one like RPD that changes the structure of relationships and
connections in a system, has an advantage over awareness processes that may
not lead to new work or actions. RPD creates new actions and work for
professional designers who may be completely unaware, thrust into an
environment of relational knowledge, or for newly self-empowered community
members due to the active divestment of power by professional designers.
Second, often contemplative and awareness-based methods lead to personal or
insular change and never transition to change for social justice. I had this
conversation with participants while participating in a contemplative dance
workshop that moves from emotions to art, from art to awareness, and from
awareness to action. Often the change or action is personal and there can be a
disconnection to larger, needed social change and actions. Because of the shift of
the leadership spectrum to the community, RPD often leads to social change,
evidenced in various movements such as U.S. civil rights and labor rights
(Udoewa, 2022a, 2022b in press).
Radical participatory design tends to create more systemic action by inviting
new entrants into systems change. As Cunningham notes, awareness-based
methods improve the effectiveness of what change agents are already trying to do
(2021). They do not necessarily invite more people into the work. If the
fundamental work required for systems change is to align the purposes and
awareness of all system actors, awareness needs to spread to people who do not
practice awareness-based methods. However, there are people who are not
willing to participate in contemplative or awareness-based practices as they are
not comfortable or accustomed to operating from that emotional or spiritual
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center. However, participatory design is often defined and viewed as a
participatory way of practicing design, and a person may not realize the
awareness-based dimensions of the practice. Designers new to systems change
may practice RPD with less trepidation than an explicit awareness-based
practice.
Lastly, RPD more naturally leads to systems practice (a practice focused on
improving the health of a system), futures design (the use of longer-term
forecasting or visioning to drive design choices in the present), and other asset-
based methodologies. Due to the shift of the leadership spectrum to the
community, the community chooses the methodology instead of the professional
designer, opening up a variety of possibilities. When conducting RPD, it is quite
natural for the work to become asset-based because community members
naturally define themselves by what they offer and what gifts they bring, not by
what they lack. I view systems practice and futures design as asset-based
methodologies because instead of focusing on the problem, they focus on assets:
the system dynamics and health, and a shared vision of the future, respectively.
Community members know, implicitly or explicitly, the dynamics of the system
in which they sit and often highlight the system concerns and the
interconnectedness of the system components when the design team is
considering the plausibility of a particular option. Communities contain deep
experiential and cultural wisdom that understands the system and underscores
needs outside of human needs. For example, I work on a community project
where the team has designed several system interventions based on high-impact
leverage points found while analyzing a system map the team created based on
their systems research of generational racialized trauma in the rural south
(Jagannathan & Seugling, 2018). Through RPD, communities, society, and the
environment benefit from more systemic solutions, avoiding HCD solutions that
leave the problem unaddressed, make it worse, or only temporarily resolve it.
Designers benefit from learning systems practice skills.
Trauma-responsive Design
Radical participatory design is a more effective approach to practice trauma-
informed and trauma-responsive design than trauma-informed design based only
on mainstream institutional knowledge (Jackson et al., 2020). All designers,
including RPD designers, should practice trauma-informed design because it is
not possible to know if a particular community member, interacting with
researchers or their designs, has experienced trauma. One 2016 epidemiological
study, conducted in twenty-four countries, found that over 70% of research
respondents had experienced at least one trauma event and 30.5 per cent had
experienced four or more trauma events (Benjet et al., 2015). When working
among historically and presently marginalized, colonized, and oppressed
communities, the percentage of people experiencing trauma can be even higher.
Trauma-informed design is design that involves three components. First,
trauma-informed design is design that recognizes that people can have many
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different traumas in their lives including past traumatic events whose adverse
effects can still be present today, as well as the possible paths to recovery.
Second, trauma-informed design involves designers who recognize the signs and
symptoms of trauma in participants, researchers, and societal systems. Third,
and most importantly, trauma-informed design is designing in ways to avoid
triggering and to resist retraumatizing participants through research and design
work and interactions.
The US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
(SAMHSA) defines six principles of a trauma-informed approach (SAMHSA,
2014).
1. Safety.
2. Trustworthiness and Transparency.
3. Peer Support.
4. Collaboration and Mutuality.
5. Empowerment, Voice and Choice.
6. Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues.
Instead of the designer having to carry the weight of ensuring these six
principles, RPD bypasses this work. In the RPD approach, peer support,
collaboration, mutuality, empowerment, voice, and choice are more naturally a
part of the process because the community is participating, leading, and driving
the process. The community brings its cultural and historical knowledge and
lived experience including gender identities and issues. Because their presence is
welcome and their voices are heard and they see other community members
leading, safety is increased and anxiety is reduced both in the research and
design process and in interacting with designs created by the design team. Trust
is increased and community design members offer transparency and
communication to the broader community about the work they are doing. In
other words, the SAMHSA principles are built into the RPD framework naturally
as the community is embedded on the design team as equal, full members with
leading voices.
Of course, in general life, traumatized people can traumatize other people. In
a design process, a trauma-informed design team may be at a disadvantage if
their practices are only based on mainstream, institutional, social work
knowledge. Because mainstream, institutional knowledge or 3rd-person knowing
is studying lives, bodies, experiences, cultures, communities, and more, it is
always behind the lived, experiential, embodied, intuitive, relational, communal,
cultural, and spiritual knowledge itself. Through the RPD meta-methodology, the
team is better able to be trauma-responsive due to a greater array of
epistemologies providing and embedding more current trauma information and
updated care practices. For instance, in the digital literacy project, the design
team was able to avoid triggering and retraumatizing often forgotten people in
temporary housing because the design team was composed of community
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members who knew what it was like to be in such a situation (Udoewa, Mathew,
Al-Hafidh, et al., 2016; Udoewa, Mathew, Gupta, et al., 2017). Through RPD,
designers benefit from experiential knowledge-based and skill-based trauma-
responsive practices, and community members and designers benefit from
reduced triggers and harm, as well as an increased sense of care and belonging.
Challenges and Barriers to Radical Participatory Design
The fundamental and most dangerous difficulty of RPD is the tendency for an
RPD process to stop being critically and radically participatory. This can be
mediated by the second characteristic of RDP: community members outnumber
the designers.
In designer-initiated projects, an RPD process may flip to CPD, as well,
because the designer or the design organization decides to usurp or regain
control, rejecting the work of the community. Perhaps the community members
were only invited for a short period of time so the project reverts back to an
organizational design injustice process. Or the designers and the organization
never made plans for the critical involvement past the design phase into the
implementation phase. To address these pitfalls, I have learned several lessons
from experience. Strategically work to institutionalize RPD in the organization
so that an RPD project is not simply a one-time event or an approval process
each time. Secure resources, such as funding, to make RPD a continual part of
the project work. Contract community members throughout the lifecycle of the
product or service. Create transition plans so that community members can
retire from the RPD work and new community members can join and take the
place of the retiring members. Practice relinquishing power daily. Due to the
structure of society and the continued aggregation and consolidation of power in
certain organizations and people, it is important that the divestment of power be
a continual practice. The designers and the design organization should continue
to divest of power while the community members assume power even in the
implementation stage. When the divestment of power is done to the core, even if
a design organization wanted to take control and run the project differently, the
organization could not do this. The design artifacts, the narratives, and the
resources are all within the control of community members. If these resources
are not within the control of the community, the designers and design
organization did not truly give up all power. In the following section, I will give
advice on how to choose projects where the organization is more likely to give up
power.
Another challenge for designers in the RPD process is privileging the process
and their expertise over the lived experience of the community members. The
nonlinearity of the process should not come from a designer’s power as facilitator,
making decisions and planning apart from the community between design
activities. The nonlinearity in the design process should come from the insight,
inclination, needs, desires, and even disruption of the community member
designers on the team (Knutz & Markussen, 2020). In the recent digital literacy
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project, the design team implemented a positive deviance research method in the
middle of prototyping because the community member designers were feeling
uninspired (Udoewa, Mathew, Al-Hafidh, et al., 2016; Udoewa, Mathew, Gupta,
et al., 2017). Likewise, in the same project, I, a professional designer, did not
“correct” their designs from a Western Anglocentric design perspective, but
watched them aesthetically design what was most pleasing to them, based on
their experiences and values. We were practicing pluriversal design.
Keeping in mind that the design team may be more heterogeneous as a
result of the RPD process, one must pay more attention to team dynamics
(Huybrechts et al., 2020). Mixing community members with designers of largely
homogenous backgrounds juxtaposes multiple subcultures together. The team
must work to establish a strong foundation of trust and safety, and then, upon
that foundation, cultivate a culture that mines for conflicting ideas in order to get
to the best ideas (Lencioni, 2012). This type of culture is not automatic and must
be built on any team, especially and including an RPD team which may have
designers who have never worked with community members and vice versa.
Making decisions in ways that do not privilege the designers can be difficult.
There is no one way RPD teams make decisions because, generally, design team
members try to use culturally appropriate ways of making decisions. Usually, we,
design team members, decide as a group how to make decisions in such a way
that everyone will support the decision, even if the decision was not their
personal choice. In order for the support to be present when decisions are made,
we decide how to decide, using either unanimity, consensus, or consent-based
decision making (Bockelbrink et al., 2022). Once a particular choice is unanimous
or we have a consensus or complete consent, we can proceed to make decisions
using the chosen decision making process. In some RPD, there is also an eco-
relational approach to the politics of decision making in which people do not voice
individual desires but simply carry out tasks with aligned purpose, like parts of
the human body. The ecological system of people makes decisions based on the
collective purpose (similar to the way that blood might rush the limbs during a
flight, fight, or freeze response without any part of the body making an explicit
conscious decision).
Due to the educational nature of the RPD process, decolonial concepts of
time, and lives of community members, RPD may take longer than design
injustice or CPD because of availability, pace of community life, decentering
white-supremacist sense of urgency, and the many learning and practicing
sessions (Smith, 2021; Mowris, 2020; Creative Reaction Labs, n.d.). When
compared to CPD outcomes over shorter project timelines, communities alongside
whom I have worked value the RPD outcomes over the longer time. It is helpful
to plan for this time and flexibility from the start and communicate the flexibility
and timelines to stakeholders and community members.
Lastly, RPD does not avoid the problem of bias on the design team. In fact,
the participating community members may represent a biased portion of the
community and their biased lived experience can shift the work the design team
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does, creating designs that do not serve other portions of the community (Taoka
et al., 2018). To counteract this effect, choose a qualitatively representative
sample, when possible. Avoid looking for a representative from every family in a
community or subgroup. Rather, list all the attributes of community members
that might alter how one would design for them. Then make sure the design
team has community members from different parts of each attribute spectrum
(IDEO.org, 2016). Any bias or limited knowledge on the design team should be
addressed by recruiting a qualitatively representative sample of the community
as research participants. The bias of the community members on the design team
can still affect the process. Conduct “Beginner’s Mindset,” “Observing vs
Interpreting,” and other bias awareness training like bias journaling for the
entire team (IDEO.org, 2007). I usually repeat bias journaling weekly and review
my writings ahead of each research session. Ideally, conduct the training
sessions before the research and interview and observation guide creation. The
training does not eliminate bias, but serves to make the entire design team more
aware of their bias and, thereby, to limit its adverse impact.
Organizations can still pose a barrier. It is unnatural for those with power to
surrender it, a requirement for the success of the RPD process which involves a
power exchange. Organizational leaders often prohibit RPD work because they
do not want to invest the time or resources. Others do not want to invest in
proper ethical treatment of external community members. Others do not
understand what purpose designers have if design can be done by anyone. Many
are afraid of anything new, and are change-averse. If the organization and its
methods are successful by some measure, they do not want to change it. Others
do not trust community members and want to retain control.
Conclusion
There are many challenges when participating in RPD work. The design team
must take care to plan for a longer, educational process, working to reduce bias
on the design team, and specifically working to prevent the RPD process from
switching to a CPD process. The act of divesting of power is a continual act into
which the designers and design organization must repeatedly enter. Ultimately,
an RPD process is most successful when alternative systems of value and ways of
living in the world are created.
Organizations resist giving up power. One barrier is not understanding the
purpose of designers and paying for design services if the community can design.
Designers have honed a craft that can be helpful to the RPD process. Their
knowledge is not privileged above community experiential and cultural
knowledge. Designer knowledge is still useful and especially powerful when
combined with community knowledge. For example, a community, practicing
community-driven design, might call a structural engineer to validate their
building design. I have worked on a learning design project in which the
community unearthed learning design principles and created designs based on
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learner needs without a learning designer. Still, if needed, communities may
invite designers at any stage such as research, design, or implementation.
Ultimately, the invitation to divest of power, as a designer, can still be
accepted even if the organization refuses to do so. One can divest of one’s power
by leaving such organizations. The best way to engage in RPD work is not to
fight unwilling organizations, though important, but to work with fellow
community members in the local community on local problems. This work will
automatically be RPD because one is a community member, not an outside
designer. The designer’s design skills are a benefit to the community just as the
skills of the other members are a benefit to the community. Foremost, the
designer’s lived experience in the community makes the designer a member and
positioned to co-lead and drive the work alongside other members.
In future work, I will go beyond general relational design which includes
RPD and elaborate on a subset of RPD that I call Relational Design. In
Relational Design, design team members do not only design relationally, or
alongside community members. Design team members also replace various
extractive and transactional steps in the generic design process with explicitly
dialogic and relationship methodologies and activities. Secondly, I want to
elaborate more on the decision-making process and options in an RPD project. I
will show what RPD decision-making looks like, highlight a relational and
biosystems approach to decision making, and share how to make decisions in a
way to minimize the likelihood that an RPD project flips to a CPD project.
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