The Design of Pseudo-Participation

• Main Authors: Palacin, Victoria (Author), Nelimarkka, Matti (Author), Reynolds-Cuéllar, Pedro (Author), Becker, Christoph (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Civic Media (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association for Computing Machinery, 2020-04-16T19:48:00Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 Participation is key to building an equitable, realistic and democratic future. Yet a lack of agency in decision making and agenda-setting is a growing phenomenon in the design of digital public services. We call this pseudo-participation by and in design. The configuration of digital artifacts and/or processes can provide an illusion of participation but lack supportive processes and affordances to allow meaningful participation to happen. This exploratory paper examines the realm of pseudo-participation in the design of public digital services through two concepts: 1) pseudo-participation by design, digital interfaces, and tools that provide the illusion of participation to the people, 2) pseudo-participation in design, processes in which those affected by the design decisions are marginalized and not given any agency. We contribute to the re-imagination of participatory design in modern societies where the role of politics has become ubiquitous and is yet to be critically scrutinized by designers.