How to Design the Participation of Non-Experts

Design decisions have long been held in the hands of experts. The people who use, inhabit, and are affected by the result are placed on the receiving end of what has already been made. A line of research from the late twentieth century to the present has questioned this arrangement and sought to invite non-experts into the process of design.

Two questions run through it. The first is how to design the participation of people who hold no professional expertise, without letting it collapse into mere consultation. The second is what conditions and tools make that participation possible. Experts and non-experts differ in vocabulary, in the grounds of their judgment, and in how they spend their time. To make collaboration hold across those differences, one has to assemble settings, tools, and relationships.

This note organizes the literature on the design of collaboration into a single map made of four lineages.

• The sociotechnics of an age when everybody designs: Manzini’s diffuse design; the Nordic tradition of participatory design
• Boundary objects and the translation of knowledge: Star & Griesemer; Carlile’s three-layer framework
• Generative tools and probes: Sanders & Stappers’s co-creation research; making at the front end
• Infrastructuring, agonism, and the inequality of participation: temporal extension, design things, design justice, the capability approach

The broader story of how design research imported methods and theories from the social sciences is set out in design-social-science-nexus. This note narrows to the themes of participation and collaboration and reselects the literature accordingly. Where the methods of participatory design sit within the lineage of qualitative research is placed in design-research-methodology-mainstream.

The Sociotechnics of an Age When Everybody Designs

Participatory design grew out of the Nordic labor movement and the tradition of industrial democracy. In 1970s and 1980s Scandinavia, workers reframed the introduction of computer systems not as a technical decision handed down from above, but as an object of negotiation that shaped how they worked. Ehn (1988) argued for workers’ right to take part in system design and positioned design not as technical optimization but as a site of political negotiation¹. Participatory design was a set of methods and, from the outset, a question about who is allowed into the decisions of design.

Over the following quarter century this tradition was consolidated into a field. The handbook edited by Robertson and Simonsen (2013) gathered its Scandinavian origins and contemporary extensions into a single volume and gave participatory design the contours of an independent research area². Participation is not a one-off workshop technique but a tradition of practice carried forward with its own history and norms.

The move to widen the subject of participation beyond experts was generalized further in the context of social innovation. Manzini (2015) distinguished the work of professional designers as expert design from the design-like activity that non-experts carry out in the course of everyday life as diffuse design³. Once one takes the view that everyone is designing something, the expert’s role shifts from monopolizing the solution of problems to arranging the conditions under which many people’s design capacities can come into play. This opened participation from the one-directional figure of “experts involving non-experts” toward a figure of redistributing the capacities of both.

Yet the universality of the capacity to design does not by itself guarantee the equality of participation. Whose design capacity is actually exercised, and whose is buried, depends on tools, settings, and modes of evaluation. That is the problem the later lineages take up.

Boundary Objects and the Translation of Knowledge

Experts and non-experts can sit at the same table and still fail to understand each other. Each has cultivated knowledge inside a different practice, knowledge that is localized to their own setting, embedded in tools and procedures, and built through invested time and effort. The concept of boundary objects names a device by which collaboration holds across those differences.

Star and Griesemer (1989) analyzed, from the founding history of Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, the conditions under which amateur collectors, professional scientists, and administrators could collaborate without full consensus⁴. A boundary object, as they drew it out, is an artifact that combines the plasticity to adapt to each party’s local needs with the robustness to maintain a common identity across sites. Specimens, maps, and standardized forms carry different meanings in each world while retaining a structure common enough across worlds to remain recognizable. For precisely this reason they work as a means of translation⁵.

What is required when knowledge crosses a boundary depends on the nature of the boundary it crosses. From ethnography of product development, Carlile (2002, 2004) distinguished three layers of knowledge boundary⁶⁷. Where vocabulary is shared, knowledge can pass by transfer; where the same words carry different meanings, it requires translation; and where interests and premises conflict, it requires transformation, in which the parties rework their own knowledge. Each layer corresponds to a different kind of boundary object, and at boundaries marked by conflict the object works to make functional differences visible and to stabilize negotiated meanings.

The boundary-object lineage carries one practical implication for participatory design. To make non-expert participation hold is not to drill professional vocabulary into people, but to prepare devices of translation through which both sides can engage in the language of their own world. The design of what to make visible and what to stabilize shapes the quality of collaboration.

Generative Tools and Probes

The lineage of co-creation and generative research carried the idea of a translation device into the front end of design.

Sanders and Stappers (2008) described a shifting landscape of design as a move from treating users as subjects of study to treating them as co-makers⁸. The people who use something are no longer an object to be investigated but a subject who generates ideas alongside experts. This shift moved the designer’s role from the one who supplies answers to the one who prepares the settings and tools through which people can voice their own experience.

Convivial Toolbox (2012) systematized the tooling for this⁹. Sanders and Stappers organized the generative tools that draw out the emergence of ideas from non-designers at the early stage of design. Probes send fragments of everyday life back to unearth experience, kits let participants assemble their own thoughts, and prototypes give form that can be examined. Non-experts express through making what they cannot put into words. The conviction running through this lineage is that participation is made possible not by demanding abstract statements but by handing over materials that people can work with by hand.

This conviction sits next to the idea of scaffolding developed in education. A design that gives support to underwrite a learner’s gradual mastery and withdraws it as competence grows overlaps in part with tooling that raises non-expert participation step by step¹⁰. Generative tools, too, can be read as a device that supplies from the side of materials and procedures the vocabulary and perspectives a participant does not yet hold.

Infrastructuring, Agonism, and the Inequality of Participation

Participation rarely completes itself in a single workshop. Collaboration is the work of cultivating tools, relationships, and agreements over time and reworking them as the situation changes. The lineage of infrastructuring takes this temporal breadth as its subject.

Ehn (2008) recast the object of design from the finished thing to a continuing gathering in which people, things, and institutions are entangled (design things)¹¹. Design becomes not a one-off event but the design of a ground that grows as it is used. Karasti (2014) organized the discussion of infrastructuring in participatory design and established the view of infrastructure not as a completed object but as an ongoing process¹². To design participation is not only to secure agreement in the moment but to leave behind the mechanisms by which agreement keeps being renewed.

Collaboration does not always move toward consensus. Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren (2012) discussed the challenges facing contemporary participatory design as an agonistic public space that takes on conflict rather than expelling it¹³. How does one design a space where participants whose interests and values diverge keep engaging without being forced into agreement? This discussion rejected the naive assumption that participation means everyone arriving at the same conclusion and shifted the question toward the conditions under which collaboration is sustained with conflict left intact.

Opening a space for participation does not mean that everyone can take part on equal terms. Costanza-Chock (2020) took as its subject the asymmetries of power latent in the process of design and asked how the intersections of race, gender, class, and disability make some people’s participation possible while obstructing others’¹⁴. Design justice inherits the Nordic tradition of participatory design while placing at the front the reality that the very entrance to participation is distributed unequally. To design participation is not only to prepare a space but also to reexamine who can actually reach it.

The capability approach supports the same question from the side of normative theory. This framework, originating with Sen and Nussbaum, places the unit of well-being not in resources or utility but in the freedom actually to achieve valuable functionings¹⁵. Because the degree to which resources convert into freedom depends on personal, social, and environmental conditions, distributing the same tools opens different opportunities for participation to different people. Oosterlaken (2009, 2015) connected this view to design and proposed a capability-sensitive design that evaluates how technologies and artifacts support, or obstruct, people’s capabilities¹⁶. The tools that make participation possible cannot be separated from the question of whose capabilities they actually expand.

The Crossing of Lineages by Period

Period	Concept	Lineage
1988	Ehn’s work-oriented system design	Origins of participatory design
1989	Star & Griesemer’s boundary objects	Translation of knowledge
2002–2004	Carlile’s transfer / translation / transformation	Translation of knowledge
2008	Sanders & Stappers’s co-creation; Ehn’s design things	Generative tools; infrastructuring
2011	Scaffolding as instructional design	Scaffolding participation
2012	Convivial Toolbox; agonistic public space	Generative tools; agonism
2013	Consolidation of participatory design into a handbook	Institutionalization of the field
2014	Karasti’s account of infrastructuring	Infrastructuring
2015	Manzini’s diffuse design; capability-sensitive design	Everybody designs; inequality of participation
2020	Costanza-Chock’s design justice	Inequality of participation

The earlier stretch (1988–2004) laid down the assertion of a right to participate and the conceptual devices by which knowledge crosses groups. Around 2008 two extensions appeared together, the tools of co-creation and infrastructuring; through the 2010s came the consolidation of the field and the reexamination of the inequality of participation.

How to Use This Map

The four lineages illuminate the single activity of participation from different angles. Manzini’s discussion depicts the widening of who can be a subject of participation. The lineages of boundary objects and generative tools handle the translation devices that make that participation hold. Infrastructuring handles the ground that sustains participation over time, and the agonistic view takes on the fact that participation does not converge on consensus. Design justice and the capability approach reexamine to whom the entrance to participation is open.

At the same time, because these lineages developed independently of one another, reading them against each other reveals a gap. Within the scope organized in this note, no study has measured, in the same site of collaboration and at once, the ideas that generative tools draw out, the translation that boundary objects enable, and the redress of the inequality of participation. A reading that treats the design of tools that make participation possible and the distribution of the opportunity to participate as a single continuous problem remains the open task of this map.

Related Notes

• design-social-science-nexus — The lineage by which design imported methods and theories from the social sciences
• design-research-methodology-mainstream — The place of qualitative methods in design research
• litmap-design-democratization — A literature map of the democratization of design and ontological design

References

Japanese-language references

(The principal literature on this theme is concentrated in the English-language world; this note cites no Japanese primary sources.)

English-language references

• Adams, R. S., et al. (2011). Multiple Perspectives on Engaging Future Engineers. Journal of Engineering Education, 100(1), 48–88. [要出典確認] (author list, bibliographic details, and citation form tentative)
• Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., & Hillgren, P.-A. (2012). Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design Challenges. Design Issues, 28(3), 101–116. [要出典確認] (DOI)
• Carlile, P. R. (2002). A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development. Organization Science, 13(4), 442–455. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.4.442.2776
• Carlile, P. R. (2004). Transferring, Translating, and Transforming: An Integrative Framework for Managing Knowledge Across Boundaries. Organization Science, 15(5), 555–568. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1040.0094
• Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001 [要出典確認] (DOI)
• Ehn, P. (1988). Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. Arbetslivscentrum. [要出典確認] (full bibliographic details)
• Ehn, P. (2008). Participation in Design Things. In Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design (PDC ‘08), 92–101. [要出典確認] (DOI)
• Karasti, H. (2014). Infrastructuring in Participatory Design. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference (PDC ‘14), Research Papers Volume 1, 141–150. [要出典確認] (DOI)
• Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. MIT Press.
• Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. [要出典確認] (bibliographic details)
• Oosterlaken, I. (2009). Design for Development: A Capability Approach. Design Issues, 25(4), 91–102. [要出典確認] (DOI)
• Oosterlaken, I. (2015). Technology and Human Development. Routledge. [要出典確認] (bibliographic details)
• Robertson, T., & Simonsen, J. (Eds.). (2013). Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. Routledge. [要出典確認] (DOI/ISBN)
• Sanders, E. B.-N., & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the New Landscapes of Design. CoDesign, 4(1), 5–18. [要出典確認] (DOI)
• Sanders, E. B.-N., & Stappers, P. J. (2012). Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. BIS Publishers. [要出典確認] (ISBN)
• Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631289019003001

Footnotes

1. Ehn, P. (1988). Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. Arbetslivscentrum. [要出典確認] (verify full bibliographic details) ↩

2. Robertson, T., & Simonsen, J. (Eds.). (2013). Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. Routledge. [要出典確認] (verify DOI/ISBN) ↩

3. Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. MIT Press. ↩

4. Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420. ↩

5. The definition of the boundary object appears on p. 393 of the original, and the reference to translation on p. 389. ↩

6. Carlile, P. R. (2002). A Pragmatic View of Knowledge and Boundaries: Boundary Objects in New Product Development. Organization Science, 13(4), 442–455. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.4.442.2776 ↩

7. Carlile, P. R. (2004). Transferring, Translating, and Transforming: An Integrative Framework for Managing Knowledge Across Boundaries. Organization Science, 15(5), 555–568. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1040.0094 ↩

8. Sanders, E. B.-N., & Stappers, P. J. (2008). Co-creation and the New Landscapes of Design. CoDesign, 4(1), 5–18. [要出典確認] (verify DOI) ↩

9. Sanders, E. B.-N., & Stappers, P. J. (2012). Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design. BIS Publishers. [要出典確認] (verify ISBN) ↩

10. Adams, R. S., et al. (2011). Multiple Perspectives on Engaging Future Engineers. Journal of Engineering Education, 100(1), 48–88. [要出典確認] (verify author list, bibliographic details, and the scaffolding passage; citation form tentative) ↩

11. Ehn, P. (2008). Participation in Design Things. In Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design (PDC ‘08), 92–101. [要出典確認] (verify DOI) ↩

12. Karasti, H. (2014). Infrastructuring in Participatory Design. In Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference (PDC ‘14), Research Papers Volume 1, 141–150. [要出典確認] (verify DOI) ↩

13. Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., & Hillgren, P.-A. (2012). Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design Challenges. Design Issues, 28(3), 101–116. [要出典確認] (verify DOI) ↩

14. Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001 [要出典確認] (verify DOI) ↩

15. Nussbaum, M. C. (2011). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. [要出典確認] (verify bibliographic details) ↩

16. Oosterlaken, I. (2015). Technology and Human Development. Routledge. / Oosterlaken, I. (2009). Design for Development: A Capability Approach. Design Issues, 25(4), 91–102. [要出典確認] (verify DOI) ↩