PARTICIPATORY DESIGN

For too long, design has arrived in communities with solutions made elsewhere. Too often those solutions created new problems.

People hold knowledge about their own lives, and the beginnings of their own solutions. Design that starts there has to observe, listen and feel first, and often take a step back.

Every community already designs. It has its own ways of knowing, deciding and organising life, and many such ways exist side by side. Participatory design works inside them. A participatory process starts from the ties that already exist in a place, and what it leaves behind is often a new one.

Making something with people produces knowledge that asking alone doesn’t. In games, drawing and shared making, people show what they know and what they miss, including what they would not say in an interview. Knowing happens in the body and the heart as well as the head.

That makes participatory design a way of doing research. I begin with time in the field. I look for the patterns in what I saw and heard, and turn them into findings an organisation can act on. What follows, a festival, a workshop or a shared meal, is shaped and run with the people involved.