Navigating participatory dilemma's: introducing a learning technology for collectives to reflect-in-action

Abstract

For a participatory design process to have a durable impact, it needs to be tailored to the situation at hand. This makes it hard to learn across PD projects. Which lessons can you draw if everything depends on constellations and coincidences. In this paper, we argue that, in spite of all this situatedness, the collectives behind PD processes do find themselves confronted with similar dilemmas at some point in their lifecycle. These dilemmas allow us to deconstruct tailormade PD processes into generic 'configurations' that make it possible to compare and potentially learn from them. This article presents a tool, the lifecycle-circle, and a protocol, the double interview, to support this 'learning-in-action'. We will illustrate the potential of this tool and protocol by reflecting on a 'collective learning experiment' that we conducted with 12 collectives which are all involved in long-lasting PD processes.