For more than four decades, participatory design has provided exemplars and concepts for understanding the democratic potential of design participation. Despite important impacts on design methodology, participatory design has, however, been stuck in a marginal position as it has wrestled with what has been performed and accomplished in participatory practices. In a recent article we discuss how participatory design may be reinvigorated as a design research programme for democratic design experiments in the light of the decentring of human-centredness and the foregrounding of collaborative representational practices offered by the ANT tradition in the tension between a parliament of things and a laboratory of circulating references. With a starting point in the article we invite discussions on how contemporary design research practices with an emphasis on issues of democracy and the politics of design may fledge out or even break the framings of democratic design experiments.
We will open with a presentation of the main arguments of the article and the design research program that it proposes. Followed by the presentation and immediate discussions we will encourage participants to come forward with statements, reflections, perspectives and critique on the notion of democratic design experiments. Everyone can join in, but we encourage those who will be willing to prepare a longer entry for the discussion to announceit to us in advance.
The article: Binder, T., Brandt, E., Ehn, P., & Halse, J. (2015). Democratic design experiments: between parliament and laboratory. CoDesign, 11(3-4), 152-165, can be made available on request to thomas.binder@kadk.dk
Organizers: Eva Brandt, Joachim Halse, Pelle Ehn and Thomas Binder
The seminar will be held at CODE, Fabriksmestervej 12, building 90, room 90.3.15
Everyone is welcome
