Design participation(-s)

The issue of participation is revitalised in design and design research, and a second generation of designers is taking up the challenge to open up the design process for engagements and dialogue with people outside the design community. Large companies deeply embedded in technological innovation employ anthropologists and designers to study future trends through an active involvement with people who may one day be future users. Young designers are playing with the opportunities to consciously allow for and encourage people to augment and change what was previously thought of as the finished design. For the title of this special issue, we have chosen the plural: design participation(-s). With this we want to propose that the present interest in participation is diverse and multidirectional. It is driven by a genuine curiosity toward peoples’ imaginative and intangible aspirations and motivations, making the issue of participation a concern for designers as such. In contemporary design participation(-s), participation is still about engaging multiple voices. But rather than thinking of this as attempts to design in concert with particular needs, we sense a more pluralistic ambition of making design practice a creative commons for ongoing change. Within research communities, many design researchers are looking into how today’s new tendencies towards participation may be supported through a re-thinking of the design process that re-casts ‘users’ as co-creators. Two transformational moves towards design participation(-s) began to emerge in the early 1970s: the early participatory design movement that began in Scandinavia and northern Europe, and the call from within the design research community to design for society and to include non-designers in design collaborations. Participatory design has its historical origins in a critique towards an approach to design that excluded the voices of most or all users and ignored many other stakeholders as well. An inspirational turning point in this critique was the Design Research Society’s 1971 conference that called for design participation, as Sanders and Stappers discuss in this volume. The conference was both an attempt to put design in the service of societal needs and an indication of a maturing self-consciousness among designers who were ready to leave a traditional craft orientation in exchange for a modern repertoire of more openly transparent design methods. Sanders and Stappers offer an interesting mapping of the movements and currents from that time to now. They quote the 1971 talk by futurist Robert Jungk stating that it will take a generation for a design agenda of participation to address participation in idea generation. That turning point highlights how the fields of design and innovation are influenced by longer waves of change underlying the appearance of short-lived trends and fashions. CoDesign Vol. 4, No. 1, March 2008, 1–3