Course 2025 Phd Seminar on Participatory Design: Contemporary Agendas

Course description

• This course will provide an introduction to Participatory Design as a particular field of research and practice. Participatory Design grew out of a realisation that it is necessary to involve users and other stakeholders in the design of IT systems in order for these systems to have adequate functionalities for the practices into which they will become part. Further, for successful implementation of IT systems and more importantly in order to empower users and further democracy around technology development, it is necessary that mutual learning between users, designers and other stakeholders takes place. Participatory Design has developed techniques and approaches to accomplish both goals.
• The course will focus on the most recent developments within the field and will  provide a rich overview of recent advances and themes within Participatory Design as it connects to and across other fields, from HCI to interaction design, design research, informatics, design anthropology, architecture, etc. These will include publications from recent books (e.g. Bødker et al 2022) and journal special issues from Design Studies (e.g. Luck 2017), ToCHI (e.g. Bardzell et al., 2018), and CoDesign (e.g. Smith et al. 2016; Huybrechts & Teli 2020), as well as a forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design (2014) in which the lecturers are engaged.

Aim

• Participants will be introduced to and debate contemporary issues regarding user participation in the development of new technologies, especially IT, as well as the diversification of Participatory Design to new domains and non-Western regions.

Target group/Participants

• The course is relevant for early as well as late stage PhDs. We will target a diverse group of PhD students working in global contexts and geographical regions with participatory approaches and concerns.

Form

• The course will be a combination of pre-course assignments, lectures, group work and participant presentations. During three days (and 6 modules) the participants will be introduced to diverse presentations by expert researchers in the field, and work collaboratively with aspects of the individual PhD projects.

Lecturers

• Assoc. Prof. Rachel Charlotte Smith, Aarhus University
• Prof. Claus Bossen, Aarhus University
• Reader. Sara Heitlinger, University of London

Literature - Tentative. To be confirmed 

Scaling and PD

• Saad-Sulonen, J., Eriksson, E., Halskov, K., Karasti, H., & Vines, J. (2018). Unfolding participation over time: temporal lenses in participatory design. CoDesign, 14(1), 4-16. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15710882.2018.1426773
• Slingerland, G., Murray, M., Lukosch, S., McCarthy, J., & Brazier, F. (2022). Participatory design going digital: challenges and opportunities for distributed place-making. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 31(4), 669-700. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10606-022-09438-3.pdf 

PD history and big issues

• Kensing, F., & Greenbaum, J. (2012). Heritage: Having a say. In Routledge international handbook of participatory design (pp. 21-36). Routledge.
• Bødker, S., Dindler, C., Iversen, O. S., & Smith, R. C. (2022). Participatory Design. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-02235-7 (Part I, pp. 1-46).
• Bødker, S., & Kyng, M. (2018). Participatory design that matters—Facing the big issues. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 25(1), 1-31. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3152421 
  Communities and collectives
• Di Salvo, C., Clement, A. and Pipek, V. (2013). Participatory Design for, with and by communities. In Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. Routledge.
  Karasti, H. (2014). Infrastructuring in participatory design. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference on Research Papers - PDC ’14. the 13th Participatory Design Conference, Windhoek, Namibia: ACM Press, pp. 141–150. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/2661435.2661450.
• Huybrechts, L., Benesch, H., & Geib, J. (2017). Institutioning: Participatory design, co-design and the public realm. CoDesign, 13(3), 148-159. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15710882.2017.1355006 

Emerging technologies

• Frauenberger. C. (2019). Entanglement HCI The Next Wave? ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 27,1, Article 2 (2019), 27 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3364998
• Johansen, F. B., Kjeldsen, T. K., Rosengren Jørgensen, M., Magot, S., Magot, A., Kandjengo, S.& Rodil, K. (2022). Hunting with the Ju/’hoansi in the Kalahari: A co-created VR gesture application. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2022 Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference (pp. 1-2). https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3547522.3547715
• Smith, R. C., Schaper, M. M., Tamashiro, M. A., Van Mechelen, M., Petersen, M. G., & Iversen, O. S. (2023). A research agenda for computational empowerment for emerging technology education. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 38, 100616. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212868923000533 

Decolonial PD

• Kambunga, A. P., Smith, R. C., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., & Otto, T. (2023). Decolonial design practices: Creating safe spaces for plural voices on contested pasts, presents, and futures. Design Studies, 86, 101170. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X2300011X
• Clarke, R., Talhouk, R., Beshtawi, A., Barham, K., Boyle, O., Griffiths, M., & Baillie Smith, M. (2022, August). Decolonising in, by and through participatory design with political activists in Palestine. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022-Volume 1 (pp. 36-49). https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3536169.3537778
• Smith, R. C., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Loi, D., de Paula, R. A., Kambunga, A. P., Samuel, M. M., & Zaman, T. (2021, May). Decolonizing design practices: Towards pluriversality. In Extended abstracts of the 2021 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-5), https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3441334 

Routledge International Handbook in Contemporary Participatory Design (forthcoming).
Presentations will draw on the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design, 2024, edited by Smith, R., Loi, D, Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Huybrechts, L. and Simonsen, J.. The particular chapters highlighted here are the following: :

• Chapter 2: Scaling Of Participatory Design, Bossen, C., Talhouk, R. & Vines J. (forthcoming):. In Routledge International Handbook in Contemporary Participatory Design (forthcoming)
• Chapter 3: Collectives and Participatory Design: Huybrechts, L., Teli, M., Saad-Sulonen, J., Sciannamblo, M. (forthcoming)
• Chapter 5: Decolonisation and Participatory Design, Winschiers-Theophilus, H., R.C. Smith, F.M.C van Amstel, A. Botero (forthcoming)
• Chapter 6: Emerging Technologies and Alternative Futures, Frauenberger, C., Smith, R. C., Loi, D., Forlano, L., Iversen, O. S. (forthcoming)

Venue

• 4 - 6 June 2025. 09.00-16.00. Helsingforsgade 12 , 8200 Aarhus N. Building 5335, room 184+192

Course dates:

• 04 June 2025 09:00 - 16:00
• 05 June 2025 09:00 - 16:00
• 06 June 2025 09:00 - 16:00