Politics of mattering in the practices of participatory design

Abstract In this paper,1 we join those in the field of Participatory Design (PD) that have become inspired by the “ontological turn” as captured in the proliferating discussions around relationality, becoming, and nonhuman agency. The paper offers an account from a PD case where a social media platform was designed with and by professionals for their collaboration around the topic of workplace bullying and harassment. Through this account, this paper reimagines PD in a “posthuman landscape” and explores how this ontological turn forces—and/or enables—a rethinking of ethics and politics in PD. In a timely conference which asks for scrutinizing the ways that the political heritage of democracy, participation, and equality can be enacted in the diverse terrains of PD, our short paper proposes the “politics of mattering” as a way of accounting for the design process as an always-relational becoming and its practices as already-political