Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design

This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of key themes and agendas in contemporary Participatory Design across diverse disciplines, continents, communities, and practices. Building on Participatory Design?s core values of empowerment and democracy, the handbook explores how the field is developing and diversifying to address contemporary societal challenges in a global community.

Participatory Design actively engages peoples, groups and other actors in collaborative design processes to explore and co-create their everyday technologies, practices, and environments. In doing so, Participatory Design aims to address social justice and agency by including diverse actors in the collective shaping of alternative futures. Participatory Design embraces a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, environments, organisations and institutions more responsive to human and planetary needs. In this volume, a multidisciplinary and international group of highly experienced and recognised experts present an authoritative review of the contemporary field and discuss the diverse opportunities and challenges that arise from pivotal issues in Participatory Design, including scaling, collectives, sustainability and more-than-human, decolonisation, emerging technologies and AI, new approaches, methods, and engagement beyond academia. 

The handbook advances contemporary research, theory, and practice, and highlights case studies that demonstrate how Participatory Design can bring about game-changing shifts in diverse contexts. The volume is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, scholars, and professionals who seek to utilise Participatory Design research and practice to enrich, support and transform complex contemporary conditions towards inclusive, sustainable and transitional futures.

Amidst growing awareness of the need for future making projects that decentre the role of top-down and profit-driven institutions, this Handbook offers an update on the premises and practices of participatory design. Designing here is not a goal or artifact-oriented task to be completed, but ongoing engagement in the resource-differentiated locations, contested politics, relations, knowledges, and collective practices through which transformative possibilities are materialized. As reflected in these writings, the field itself is opening to include sites of design innovation beyond the parochial boundaries of the hyper-developed world, including pluriversal social movements aimed at unsettling, reparation, transition, and regeneration. As a sign of the field?s maturity, and consistent with its commitment to learning in doing, these chapters offer more in the way of critical reflection on troubles encountered than on their neat resolution. It is precisely for this reason that the Handbook will be an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners interested in the history and present of the field, as well as those already engaged in projects of participatory design who are looking for renewed inspiration.

Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK