This PhD-course will investigate the concept of Participation, how Participation is approached within Participatory Design, and, especially, what genuine Participation means, includes, and requires from the participants. We will investigate Participation in Participatory Design from traditional perspectives of power and mutual learning, and from contemporary perspectives of infrastructuring, genuine Participation, and the academic-personal competence that qualifies the human contact central in all Participatory Design activities.
Course format:
The course format is a mixture of presentations, group discussions and reflections, based on readings and the participants own experiences with Participatory Design projects, as well as short physical grounding exercises (a sort of yoga-type exercises) offered during the course: Grounding exercises are introduced as a tool to develop the student’s academic-personal competence to facilitate genuine Participation in Participatory Design by (1) being present when engaging in Participatory Design activities and (2) sense the contact quality in communicative interactions.
Please look into the short paper entitled Contact Quality in Participation: A “Sensethic” Perspective for an introduction to the academic-personal competence: http://jespersimonsen.dk/Downloads/p45-simonsen.pdf
All readings is available from this dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/7m5fnzylo170rce/AAAcUT6uxPuUqneaIMxbtiHNa?dl=0
