Ethics: engagement, representation and politics-in-action

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Practitioners of Participatory Design share a commitment to those worldviews that recognise people as active participants in the shaping of the world around them. Participatory Design, then, has at its core an ethical motivation to support and enhance how people can engage with others in shaping their world, including their workplaces, over time. This ethical motivation is not some optional extra to accessorise any understandings and specific practices of Participatory Design. It is its essence and structures its definition and ongoing development. In the same way that a human body needs to breathe to live, Participatory Design cannot continue to exist without this commitment to working together to shape a better future. There are a number of principles underlying Participatory Design (e.g. Greenbaum 1993;Kensing and Blomberg 1998; Beck 2002). One is that the people who do a particular activity (including work) know most about how it gets done. So involving them in the design of the technologies they will use means that the outcomes are more likely to be successful. But this principle also expresses the ethical stance that respects people’s expertise and their rights to represent their own activities to others, rather than having others do this for or to them. The important point for our discussion here is that the ethical stance about the making of the technology is not incidental to the quality and value of the outcomes. This is why, for example, it is so important in Participatory Design that representations of people and activities, such as personas and scenarios, are developed by and with those whose activities they are. A second principle calls for the development and use of processes and tools that enable design-ers, technology users and other stakeholders to learn from each other through understanding each other’s perspectives and priorities. This leads to more robust communication among those involved in the design, which leads, in turn, to outcomes that are more likely to be successful. But, again, it also expresses the ethical stance that different voices need to be heard, understood and heeded if a design process is to be genuinely participatory. The success of the outcome is fundamentally linked to the different voices who have been able to contribute to its design. This is why, for example, ethnographic studies of practice are so common in Participatory Design projects; they enable designers to develop understandings of the lived experience of those who will use the new technology and the context in which they will use it. It is also why prototyping has always been so important to Participatory Design; prototypes function as models of some aspect of the developing design that can be seen, interrogated and reflected upon by a potentially diverse group of people participating in the design process. Developing design methods that enable people to work together to imagine and then design new kinds of technologies, spaces and products has always been a strength and focus of Participatory Design research and practice, and among its major contributions. Perhaps the core principle of Participatory Design is that people have a basic right to make decisionsabout how they do their work and indeed any other activities where they might use technology. This is also the most contested aspect of Participatory Design, its most directly stated ethical commitment and its main point of difference to more mainstream user-or human-centred design approaches. It is why, for example, Participatory Design has important political agendas expressed by its close collaboration with identifiable political movements that are informed and underpinned by ethical discourses around human rights and a robust civil society. This emancipatory agenda is shared by participatory approaches within other areas of design such as architecture and town planning. The Participatory Design of information technology originated in the workplace democracy movement in Scandinavia in the 1970s and much of its early work was done with the trade union movement. Since then, projects within developing countries and with marginalised and vulnerable groups in society have also been major expressions of the human rights agenda that defines Participatory Design.