short-paper

The Design of Pseudo-Participation

Authors:

Victoria Palacin,

Matti Nelimarkka,

Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar,

Christoph BeckerAuthors Info & Claims

PDC '20: Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 2

Pages 40 - 44

https://doi.org/10.1145/3384772.3385141

Published: 18 June 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Participation is key to building an equitable, realistic and democratic future. Yet a lack of agency in decision making and agenda-setting is a growing phenomenon in the design of digital public services. We call this pseudo-participation by and in design. The configuration of digital artifacts and/or processes can provide an illusion of participation but lack supportive processes and affordances to allow meaningful participation to happen. This exploratory paper examines the realm of pseudo-participation in the design of public digital services through two concepts: 1) pseudo-participation by design, digital interfaces, and tools that provide the illusion of participation to the people, 2) pseudo-participation in design, processes in which those affected by the design decisions are marginalized and not given any agency. We contribute to the re-imagination of participatory design in modern societies where the role of politics has become ubiquitous and is yet to be critically scrutinized by designers.

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PDC '20: Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 2

June 2020

212 pages

ISBN:9781450376068

DOI:10.1145/3384772

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 18 June 2020

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PDC '20: Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation Otherwise

June 15 - 20, 2020

Manizales, Colombia

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3666094.3666103
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3661456.3666079
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