Design Participation Work and the Workshop as Its Microcosm
摘要
Design participation in today’s world requires more than implementing methods, following general principles or operationalizing normative stances. Besides skills in selecting and implementing codesign methods, there is a larger repertoire of issues that need attention, if one takes the promises and limits of participation seriously. To gain a better understanding of what is involved, we introduce six types of work that go into participatory and community forms of design: framing work, relevance work, selection work, constituency building work, intermediate design work, collaboration work, and outcome work. The chapter introduces these work types through the most common and at least seemingly most straightforward arrangement in designing participation: the co-located workshop. To this end, the chapter analyzes two one-day workshops that feature different aims, contexts, and underpinnings. The first of the workshops is an envisioning workshop for future maker spaces for the flagship Oodi Central Library, which eventually became a lead-user workshop because of the demanding knowledge requisites, long time horizon, and solution and trend knowledge that was to be coproduced in the workshop. The second workshop is a concept design workshop for a design project to build an information portal for Finnish maternity wards. This workshop is in many respects a more classic participatory workshop situated in the middle phases of a design project. It enables multiple interacting user groups to ideate, define, and make decisions about a design concept, mediated by a wireframe prototype, facilitator, and results from an earlier field study. These two workshops present two ends to design participation: the latter one that is relatively straightforward yet beneficial to plan and run and an instrumentally effective way to proceed in the design project, and the other that is complex, demanding, and resource-intensive yet produces outcomes that would be very difficult to get to by any other means.