Issues of Participation: A Framework for Choices and Compromises

This paper appears in the International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development edited by Constance Kampf (Aarhus University, Denmark) and José Abdelnour-Nocera (University of West London, UK). Copyright 2014, IGI Global, www.igi-global.com. Posted by permission of the publisher.Members of the Participatory Design (PD) community often raise concerns about participation – participation in what, by whom, and for what purpose? To help determine and answer questions important to participatory practice, the author derived a framework of key issues of participation using literature from Participatory Design and related practices such as Participatory Action Research, Participatory Democracy and Participatory Development. The key issues are: values, representation, power relations, context, transformations, effectiveness, and sustainability. The author posits that giving attention to these issues when designing, conducting and reflecting on participation will improve participatory practices by making choices and compromises more explicit to those involved in the research as well as those who review the research results. The paper discusses how the author derived the framework and then uses the selected literature to explore each of the seven issues and how they can be addressed in participatory practice in general, and within PD more specifically