BINGO! PARTICIPATION!

Participatory design is often suggested to favor the empowerment of users. Participatory design can take place as ideation workshops, users panels, co-design sessions, brainstorming, role-playing, collective prototyping, etc.
Traditionally, participation is seeking consensus.

Yet, consensus does not mean simply the erasure of conflicts for the benefit of common interests. Consensus means erasing the conflictual nature of the very givens of common life. As such, participation is problematic in several ways.
First, it’s favoring people who are willing to participate. For instance, researches on participatory local politics reveal that people who feel entitled to participate in participatory assemblies are most of the time culturally, socially and economically privileged people. Those who feel authorized to raise their voice on a topic, are those who feel like they have the social entitlement to raise it.

When run by organizations and institutions acknowledged as instances of knowledge and power, the people perceived with the lowest agency are not only the people who won’t express themselves, but also the people whose voice is being given a lesser importance.

Second, what should be the language of participation then, who should elaborate it, and how, to prevent it from bias ? If you want to include the weakest elements of a group, for instance, how are you, as a designer, that is to say somebody perceived as an expert, making sure that you are understood and you understand what is
said ? In which discursive framework are you working ? How complaisant is this discursive framework ? Not only participation favors traditional unequal repartitions of power, driven by language, but this very language is encoded with multiple layers of situated insights.

A few years ago, London School of Economics' department of sociology investigated London project housings with designers, in order to determine what place architecture and urban planning was taking in the construction of the social identity of a group. These project housings were generically perceived as social ghettos, dangerous, scary and decaying.
Designers ran interviews with the help of sociologists. All the designers had already conducted users interviews in the context their professional practice. They all were confident in their ability to exchange and interact with inhabitants, to understand the insights and to work accordingly.

But surprise : what sociology revealed was that what you hear is sometimes not what is said. The more the designers were talking with the so-called users, the more they were confronted with abundant paradoxical data. Working with sociologists helped the designer not to elaborate the best design project, but only to realize that what users might be saying sometimes might sound contradictory and confused.
In the end, as a designer was noting : « the more we talked with the users, the less we understood what they were really expecting. »