The Power and Place Collaborative: Participatory Strategies for Scaling

Abstract

To challenge unidirectional, colonizing, and capitalist frameworks of scaling systems change, this article offers alternative strategies for design practitioners, educators, and researchers interested in diverse forms of scaling change across complex social systems. In particular, the article analyzes a participatory and transdisciplinary approach to systemic design practice and education that illustrates the process and benefits of scaling across, deep, in, scree, and long. The Power and Place Collaborative is a community-first, equity-centered, emergent, and situated educational approach to designing complex social systems change. An analysis of the Collaborative’s dynamic processes, activities, and relationships provides a case study on the possibility of imagining, creating, and sustaining community partnerships that scale meaningful change at multiple levels and in diverse contexts. Drawing upon data collected from a mixed-method explanatory inquiry project, this article describes strategies for intentionally designing systems of change that can be scaled in multiple ways, including building relationships, transforming mental models, and co-creation of responses to complex problems. Design professionals seeking to develop assessment plans that capture the emergent, embodied, relational, and situated nature of systemic design and its outcomes will likely find this study’s longitudinal, mixed methods research approach to be an instructive disruption of conventional inquiry processes.