Design for Equivalence: Mutual Learning and Participant Gains in Participatory Design Processes

Abstract

The ways in which people are or are not—aware, eligible, able, invited, required, supported, willing, and/or forced, among other conditions—to participate in the procedures or experiences that constitute world-making activities—from voting, policymaking, or designing algorithms, technologies, products, programs, services, interventions, infrastructures, or systems, among other things—that affect their lives—is a central issue of our time. It demands careful consideration and is of great consequence as to whether or not the worlds we create are equitable, sustainable, and just, so that all people have free and equal standing and a real opportunity to belong and flourish. This study took up this issue in the context of participatory design practice and research and the making of sexual and reproductive health interventions with and for adolescents who are marginalized by race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India, and Chicago, Illinois, United States. The study advances knowledge in design by exploring how problem-focused, front-end participatory design processes expand or constrain the epistemic authority of less powerful actors, more specifically, systematically excluded individuals and groups. The study was conducted in two parallel phases. First, through a theoretical elaboration and critical analysis, it examined the application of Mouffean agonism in recent formulations of participatory design processes to address complex social and political issues with marginalized individuals and groups. The analysis demonstrated that a key construct—the chain of equivalence—is absent and resulted in the failure of these processes to achieve the collective, counter-hegemonic, and emancipatory responses strong enough to counter power as imagined by Chantal Mouffe. Second, an explanatory embedded multiple case study was conducted on two front-end participatory design workshops to understand what less powerful actors gain by engaging in collaborative processes of design and how practices and processes do or do not support their epistemic authority and matters of care. Thematic analysis suggested how the practices of collective information sharing and gathering— mutual learning and learning— affect participant gains and design process outputs. Additionally, thematic analysis informed a theoretical, conceptual, and practical move to expand beyond the original scope of the Mouffean chain of equivalence to include collaborating actors who may not be equivalently disadvantaged by current power relations, but who are committed to participatory design processes that prioritize the issues and matters of care of less powerful actors. When considered together, findings from both research phases inform the development of design for equivalence, at once a theoretical stance and a methodological framework to inform the selection of approaches, theories, processes, methods, practices, and tools for participatory design processes that support the epistemic authority of participants in challenging social and structural inequalities and creating articulations of the common good strong enough to counter dominant paradigms.