Small projects/large changes: Participatory design as an open participated process

TLDR

Participatory design traditionally views participation as user integration in projects, but recent work extends it to active citizen groups engaging in open, articulated processes that drive socio‑technical change. The study investigates how active citizen participation and collaborative design can foster large‑scale, sustainable change. The authors employ a planning‑by‑projects strategy, outlining five design projects and detailing how designers sparked citizen interest, aligned motivations, and empowered capabilities to support large‑scale participatory initiatives. They conclude that participatory design must merge social innovation with an open process where many small, diverse projects interact to realize a larger vision.

Abstract

This paper examines the need for large-scale, sustainable changes, and the effects of citizens' active participation and design co-operating to realise such changes. Section 1, starting from Pelle Ehn's last contribution, deals with participatory design and how it can be extended from the traditional idea of participation as the integration of users in projects, to the concept of participation as the interaction of active groups of citizens with open and articulated processes in the direction of socio-technical changes. Section 2 introduces the idea of planning by projects strategy and presents five design projects. Section 3 discusses how participatory design can be extended to give a rationale for these large-scale projects and what designers did in practice: triggered citizens' interest, aligned their motivations and empowered their capabilities. The idea emerging from this discussion is that when participatory design is intended as an approach aiming at broad and complex transformation processes its traditional notion must integrate the concept of social innovation (first step) and evolve towards the idea of an open process where a multiplicity of small, diverse, participated initiatives (or local projects) interact (second step) to achieve a larger vision.