Issues of Participation: Exploring Ideals of Participation Through a Digital Design Project with a Public Library

Weak forms of ‘user involvement’ are often conflated with ‘participation’, eroding the personal, social and political potential of participation. In this thesis, I explore ideals of participation in the context of a digital design project to understand why digital teams that engage users in conventional human-centred design (HCD) may not adopt a more participatory approach such as Participatory Design (PD) that engages users in authentic participation based on mutual learning. As a foundation, I traced the parallel but distinct trajectories of HCD and PD, identifying tensions between them based on differences in ideals of participation. Drawing on a range of participatory practices, I also derived the Issues of Participation framework comprised of seven issues: goals, representation, power relations, context, effectiveness, transformations, and sustainability. I demonstrate that these issues can help distinguish PD from HCD. In my fieldwork, I took a Participatory Action Research approach by engaging digital designers on the Account Redesign Project (ARP) at the Toronto Public Library (TPL) as co-researchers. Through a series of workshops, we reflected on participation generally and within ARP. Our reflections shed light on differences in ideals between HCD and PD as well as some of the barriers to moving beyond HCD to engaging library members in more participatory ways. I found that my co-researchers adopted HCD’s pragmatic goal of involving users as informants in order to improve the digital product and had little awareness of PD’s democratic goal of engaging users in authentic participation that gives them a say, not just a voice. Nonetheless, within TPL, they were champions for the inclusion of library members in the design of services. My findings suggest that by addressing personal and organizational barriers, designers practicing HCD may adopt and champion PD. My thesis addresses deeply held concerns within PD about “how participatory a design project has to be so as to ‘qualify’ as a PD project” (Bratteteig Wagner, 2014, p. 117). I argue that distinguishing PD from HCD is valuable in raising awareness of the democratic goals of PD, reclaiming an authentic meaning of participation, and enabling users to achieve more ‘say’ in their future.

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