Why Should Design Be Democratized?

The call to democratize design is a familiar one. It is better if everyone can take part in design; it should not be closed off to experts. The claim itself is widely shared. Yet the moment the discussion turns to the normative grounds for why this should be so, the argument thins out.

In most cases, the desirability of democratization is placed as a self-evident premise. The argument leans on the intuition that participation is good and that openness is better, without asking where that intuition comes from. But to say something is desirable is to owe an account of the standard by which it is desirable. When democratization is raised without questioning the source of that standard, it ends as a slogan.

This note maps these normative grounds by gathering them from established, published literature. It covers five threads: the lineage of participatory design, the theory of knowledge as a public good, the capability approach, theories of justice, and the redefinition of the expert’s role. These are separate bodies of literature, yet each answers the single question of why democratization is desirable from a different angle. Where related notes address the pluralization of subjects and value pathways (litmap-design-democratization), the emphasis here falls on the theoretical footing of justification itself.

The materials are limited to bibliographic information and the concepts each source proposed. Where a claim has not been verified against the pages of the original work, that is noted.

Where Did Process Democratization Begin?

The debate over democratization began not as an abstract ideal but as a concrete practice. Its origins lie in the Nordic countries of the 1970s and 1980s.

Participatory design set out from the claim that workers have a right to take part in designing the computer systems that shape their work. In Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts (1988), Pelle Ehn rejected the view of system design as a rational decision made by engineers alone¹. Design is a site of political negotiation over whose ways of working will change. If so, the involvement of those affected by the change is a matter of industrial democracy before it is a matter of efficiency.

This lineage crossed to North America and was consolidated as a field. The volume edited by Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka, Participatory Design: Principles and Practices (1993), systematically introduced the principles and practices of participatory design to the English-speaking world². Here participation is not the procedure of consulting users after the fact. It is the claim that users are continuously involved in the design decisions themselves.

Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers reorganized this practice from the side of design research. In “Co-creation and the new landscapes of design” (2008), they argued that the landscape of design was shifting from “designing for users” to “designing with users”³. The user moves from being an object that experts observe and satisfy to being a co-creator taking part in design alongside experts. Over half a century, process democratization moved from a marginal claim into the mainstream vocabulary of research.

Yet what this lineage shows is a history of practice, not a justification as such. Ehn’s argument does carry the norm of industrial democracy, but why democracy should extend to design at all remains suspended until it is connected to a more general theory. The intuition that participation is desirable needs a footing given from outside. In what follows, that footing is sought in economics, ethics, and political philosophy.

Is Design Knowledge a Public Good?

The first footing for justification comes, unexpectedly, from economics. It is the observation that the knowledge design handles has properties unlike those of a private good.

In “Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention” (1962), Kenneth Arrow analyzed why the production of knowledge falls short when left to the market⁴. Once produced, knowledge is hard to exclude others from using (non-excludability) and does not diminish when someone uses it (non-rivalry). Under these properties, producers cannot fully recoup their investment, and left alone, knowledge is not produced up to the level society needs. Arrow’s concern was with invention and research investment, but the logic extends directly to design knowledge.

Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom extended this view to knowledge in general. The volume they edited, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons (2007), recast knowledge as neither a private good nor a pure public good but as a “commons” managed in common⁵. A commons is not sustained on its own. Under the pressures of over-appropriation and enclosure, it is shared durably only through the institutional arrangements of a community.

Placing these two arguments side by side reveals the economic grounds for democratization. If design knowledge is non-excludable and non-rivalrous, enclosing it within a small group of experts is inefficient for society as a whole. Letting knowledge circulate widely allows more people to use the value it generates. Democratization is desirable not merely because it is fair, but because it is a rational allocation of resources given the properties of a public good. Yet as Hess and Ostrom show, the sharing of a commons does not hold up when neglected, and the design of institutions to support it must be asked separately.

What the Capability Approach Asks: “What Can People Do?”

The public-goods argument showed that democratization can be efficient. But efficiency alone does not reach why it is good for people. The capability approach steps into this level of “goodness.”

In Development as Freedom (1999), Amartya Sen recast development not as an increase in income or wealth but as an expansion of the freedom to choose the kind of life one has reason to value⁶. What should be asked is not what a person has, but what that person is actually able to do and to be (capability). Resources gain meaning only when they can be converted into valuable functionings. Even given the same resources, without the conditions to make use of them, freedom is not realized.

In Creating Capabilities (2011), Martha Nussbaum developed this framework in a more explicitly normative direction⁷. Nussbaum enumerates central capabilities indispensable to a life of human dignity and argues that political society bears the responsibility to secure them for each person. Capabilities become not merely a descriptive index but a normative threshold that society should aim to realize.

Connecting the capability approach to the democratization of design deepens the form of justification by one step. The claim that “everyone can take part in design” may be an observation that the capability is universally distributed. But what Sen shows is that the potential universality of a capability and the presence of the conditions to actually exercise it are two different things. Even if the right to participate exists in name, without the tools, skills, time, and support to realize participation, that right cannot be used. Democratization is desirable because it expands people’s capability not in name but in substance. And what must be expanded is not only the right to participate but also the conditions that make participation possible.

Distribution and Recognition, Seen from Theories of Justice

The capability approach focused on what an individual can do. So what happens when we ask, as a matter of justice for society as a whole, how that capability ought to be distributed among people?

In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls formulated justice as a problem of the distribution of primary goods by the basic structure of society⁸. Behind a “veil of ignorance,” where one does not know one’s own position, the principles people would choose are the equal guarantee of basic liberties and the difference principle, which maximizes the position of the least advantaged. Under this framework, whether a given distribution of a social benefit is just is evaluated from the standpoint of the worst off.

Applying Rawls’s distributive justice to design yields the following. When the capability to design, or access to the products of design, is skewed toward some, that skew is questioned by whether it can be justified from the standpoint of the least advantaged. Democratization can be grounded in the language of distributive justice, as an attempt to widen this distribution toward those in the least favorable position.

There is, however, a criticism of capturing justice by distribution alone. In Justice Interruptus (1997), Nancy Fraser argued that justice should be grasped along two dimensions, redistribution and recognition⁹. The redistribution of economic resources alone does not reach injustices such as cultural disregard and disparities of status. Whether someone is socially recognized as an equal participant is a question of justice distinct from the quantity of resources.

Fraser’s two-dimensional theory of justice shows that the democratization of design has two aims. One is the distributive task of widening substantive access to the tools, knowledge, and products of design. The other is the task of recognizing the design acts of non-experts as equal participation. Even if tools are handed out, if their users are belittled as “amateur dabbling,” the injustice at the level of recognition remains. For democratization to be complete, both distribution and recognition must be satisfied.

How Does the Expert’s Role Change?

The justifications so far have answered why democratization is desirable. The remaining question is what becomes of the expert. Democratization does not mean the erasure of the expert. It means the reconfiguration of the expert’s role, from gatekeeper into something else.

In “Meta-Design” (2003), Gerhard Fischer formulated this reconfiguration¹⁰. In conventional design, the expert makes the finished product and the user only uses it. Against this, meta-design is the activity of designing the very environment in which those who own a problem can step into designing it themselves. The expert’s work shifts from making answers to making the conditions under which others can design. This picture extends the framework Fischer and Eric Scharff had earlier set out in “Meta-Design—Design for Designers” (2000)¹¹.

What meta-design shows is that the redefinition of the expert’s role is also a consequence of the capability approach. If experts monopolize the answers, the user’s capability stays outside the user. If experts arrange the conditions for design, the capability grows on the user’s side. The move from gatekeeper to facilitator can be read as a device that converts the right to participate into a substantive capability.

Democratization also has a temporal dimension. Involving people in a one-off workshop and having people stay continuously involved in design are two different matters. In Communities of Practice (1998), Etienne Wenger conceived of learning as a trajectory of participation into a community of practice¹². People deepen their degree of participation from the periphery of a community toward its center, acquiring the practice and forming their identity within it.

Moving Wenger’s view to the democratization of design brings the conditions for sustained participation into view. Democratization is not achieved once the gate to participation is opened. There must be a community structure in which participants can keep tracing a trajectory from periphery to center. The difference between temporary and sustained participation lies in whether this trajectory is prepared. The literature on the conditions of participation itself is organized separately in litmap-participatory-reentry.

Where Do the Five Threads Meet?

The bodies of literature so far, though they set out from separate fields, converge on the single question of why democratization is desirable. The lineage of participatory design showed that democratization already has half a century of practice. The theory of knowledge as a public good showed that enclosing design knowledge is inefficient as an allocation of resources. The capability approach showed that democratization expands people’s capability in substance. Theories of justice showed that this expansion is justified on both the distributive and the recognitive sides. The redefinition of the expert’s role and the theory of communities of practice showed that democratization is the erasure of no one, but a reconfiguration of roles and the design of conditions for sustained participation.

Placing these on a single map shows that the justification of democratization cannot be reduced to a single ground. Efficiency (public goods), freedom (capability), fairness (distributive justice), and recognition (Fraser) each support democratization at a different level. Any one of them alone leaves the justification tilted to one side. The public-goods argument alone stays a matter of efficiency; the theory of justice alone stays a matter of distribution. Only when multiple grounds overlap does democratization turn from a slogan into an argument.

This map still has many blank spaces. Much of the literature treated in this note is the skeleton of bibliographic information, not verified against the pages of the originals. The work of translating the public-goods argument, the capability approach, and theories of justice into concrete evaluative criteria for design remains, here, a sketch. How the several grounds of efficiency, freedom, fairness, and recognition mesh, and where they collide, in actual scenes of design and institutions, can only be confirmed within each reader’s own practice.

Related Notes

• litmap-design-democratization — Maps democratization from ontological design and designs for the pluriverse, around who designs and through which pathway the value is realized
• design-social-science-nexus — The genealogy of design importing methods and theories from the social sciences; details the Nordic tradition of participatory design
• litmap-participatory-reentry — Participatory design and the design of collaboration; a literature map on boundary objects, infrastructuring, and the conditions of participation
• learning-scaffolding-intervention-design — A literature map of learning scaffolds and intervention design; connects to the design principles that sustain continued participation

References

• Arrow, K. J. (1962). Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention. In The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (pp. 609–626). Princeton University Press / National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/chapters/c2144
• Ehn, P. (1988). Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. Arbetslivscentrum.
• Fischer, G. (2003). Meta-Design: Beyond User-Centered and Participatory Design. In Human-Computer Interaction: Theory and Practice (Part I), Proceedings of HCI International 2003. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Fischer, G., & Scharff, E. (2000). Meta-Design—Design for Designers. In Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2000) (pp. 396–405). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/347642.347798
• Fraser, N. (1997). Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. Routledge.
• Hess, C., & Ostrom, E. (Eds.). (2007). Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. MIT Press.
• Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
• Sanders, E. B.-N., & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign, 4(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710880701875068
• Schuler, D., & Namioka, A. (Eds.). (1993). Participatory Design: Principles and Practices. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press / Alfred A. Knopf.
• Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press.

Unverified Items

• The volume (Proceedings Part I of HCI International 2003) and page range of Fischer (2003) are recorded as a bibliographic skeleton; verification of pages against the original is pending. [verification needed]
• The place of publication (Stockholm) and exact page count of Ehn (1988) may vary by edition; the publisher (Arbetslivscentrum) is confirmed. [verification needed]
• Sen (1999) circulates with Oxford University Press as the first edition and Alfred A. Knopf as the US edition; the publisher notation differs by the edition referenced. [verification needed]

Footnotes

1. Ehn, P. (1988). Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. Arbetslivscentrum. ↩

2. Schuler, D., & Namioka, A. (Eds.). (1993). Participatory Design: Principles and Practices. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ↩

3. Sanders, E. B.-N., & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. CoDesign, 4(1), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710880701875068 ↩

4. Arrow, K. J. (1962). Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention. In The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (pp. 609–626). Princeton University Press / NBER. ↩

5. Hess, C., & Ostrom, E. (Eds.). (2007). Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. MIT Press. ↩

6. Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press / Alfred A. Knopf. ↩

7. Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ↩

8. Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ↩

9. Fraser, N. (1997). Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. Routledge. ↩

10. Fischer, G. (2003). Meta-Design: Beyond User-Centered and Participatory Design. In Human-Computer Interaction: Theory and Practice (Part I), Proceedings of HCI International 2003. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ↩

11. Fischer, G., & Scharff, E. (2000). Meta-Design—Design for Designers. In Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2000) (pp. 396–405). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/347642.347798 ↩

12. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press. ↩