Participation is often treated as something that happens in a particular moment: people are invited to a workshop, meeting, consultation, design session, or decision-making process; they contribute; and then they leave.
But whether participation feels meaningful may depend just as much on what happens before people take part and after the formal activity is over.
What if we designed more deliberately for the time before and after participation?
In this thesis, you will explore how participation can be made more meaningful by looking beyond the participatory activity itself. Participation could mean taking part in a design process, shaping a public service, contributing to organisational change, or being involved in decisions that affect a community.
You might investigate questions such as:
- What shapes people’s expectations before they participate?
- How could the period before participation affect trust, motivation, preparedness, or sense of agency?
- How do people make sense of participation once it is over?
- What kinds of follow-up help people understand what happened with their contribution?
- What happens when participation is treated as a longer relationship rather than a single event?
- How do organisational conditions shape what is possible before, during, and after participation?
Possible approaches
1. Start from existing interview material
You will have access to qualitative interview data about designers’ and participants’ experiences of participatory processes, including several accounts from public-sector contexts.
Previous analysis found that people often judged whether participation had been meaningful by relating their expectations, experiences, and perceived outcomes. Social outcomes such as dialogue, learning, relationships, and shared understanding could also remain valuable even when concrete outcomes were limited.
You can begin by reanalysing part of this material from your own perspective and identifying a tension, question, or opportunity that you find interesting. From there, you can develop your own study or a design-led investigation, with e.g., prototyping.
2. Explore the time before participation
Investigate how expectations, roles, trust, motivations, or understandings are formed before people take part, and design a way of engaging with this phase.
3. Explore the time after participation
Investigate how people interpret, remember, revisit, or continue a participatory experience after the formal process has ended, and design a way of engaging with this phase.
4. Work with a particular service, technology, organisation, or community
You are very welcome to ground the thesis in a concrete context where people are invited to participate in design or decision-making.
OBS! Possibility of maybe taking part in an on-going collaborations with museums and cultural institutes
After your thesis project
You could come out of the project with:
- insight into the work of designers and others who organise participation
- a design process, intervention, prototype, service concept, or participatory format for your portfolio/CV
potentially, a collaboration with a service, organisation, or community.
Relevant courses
IN5510 – Participatory experimental design
IN5120 – Tangible interaction
IN5480 – Specialization in Research in Design of IT
Inspirational readings
Erling Björgvinsson, Pelle Ehn, Per-Anders Hillgren; Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design Challenges. Design Issues 2012; 28 (3): 101–116. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_a_00165