Towards Response-able PD: Putting Feminist New Materialisms to Work in the Practices of Participatory Design

Abstract

This paper contributes to recent discussions in the field of Participatory Design (PD) that have considered relationality, becoming, non-human, and more-than-human to invent alternative, more expansive, responsible, and accountable ways of understanding and doing PD. To add to these PD discussions of sociomaterial relationality and emergence, our aim is to bring PD practices into generative dialogue with feminist new materialist praxis. For this, we consider our past and ongoing participatory research and design engagements related to collaboration with union professionals and creative research-activism with children. Drawing methodological insights from the ways in which sociomaterial relationality and becoming informed these processes, we explore how feminist new materialism can inform PD 1) when setting up participatory practices, 2) when engaging during design events, and 3) when re-thinking designer-researchers’ responsibilities and accountabilities as unfolding from multiplicitous, multiscalar engagements. We tentatively propose the notion of response-able PD to bring these insights together.

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