Structuring Future Social Relations: The Politics of Care in Participatory Practice

Light, Ann and Akama, Yoko (2014) Structuring Future Social Relations: The Politics of Care in Participatory Practice. In: PDC '14: Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers - Volume 1. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, pp. 151-160. ISBN 9781450322560

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/2661435.2661438

Abstract

This paper explores the political shifts that take place in participatory design (PD) when the focus is upon co-designing ongoing future societal relations, beyond the immediacy of designing objects or services during project-time. Reflecting on connectedness, it looks at the politics of participation through the lens of people's interdependence, using feminist concepts of 'care' to explore the ethical commitments of designing. In particular, it speaks to Greenbaum's claim, 20 years ago, that 'we have the obligation to provide people with the opportunity to influence their own lives' (1993:47). We explore the questions this raises now, as we design in an increasingly distributed and heterogeneous socio-technical context, to give a contemporary take on long-term commitments to political and ethical outcomes in participatory design. Three contrasting case studies are interrogated to discuss how structuring of social relations was enabled, offering insights into what the politics of care might mean.

Item Type: Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords: Politics, ethics, care, structure, social relations, becoming
Subjects: W200 Design studies
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Design
Depositing User: Paul Burns
Date Deposited: 29 Oct 2014 10:01
Last Modified: 17 Dec 2023 15:52
URI: https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/17808

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