Community-centric Participatory Design
It has been argued that PD with communities, in
particular indigenous or minority groups, does not rely on
the application of the right method. Rather, it implies
defining and negotiating design tools, methods and
processes around the needs of a specific locality,
including a contextual definition of local forms of
participation (Winschiers-Teophilus et al., 2010).
Successful collaborative design with communities entails
design in the here and now, with designers and
communities co-creating their own relevant tools and
techniques, and agreeing on those processes that provide
adequate responses and solutions to the situation at hand.
A notable feature of community-centric PD is the reconfiguration
of the design space, tools, and workflows
by taking the local as central point of reference (Sabiescu,
2013). Maja van der Velden (2010) describes it as
“design for the contact zone”. The concept is borrowed
from the work of Mary Louise Pratt (1991), who defines
it as a social space of encounter between different cultural
groups, characterised by exchange, but also clashes and
conflict. Contact zones currently and historically
characterise those contexts marked by colonialism and
un-balanced power relations, which may produce unique
practices and representations. For Van der Velden
articulations and rigid determinants, such as the fixed
roles of ‘designer’ and ‘user’. It is a localized practice in
which joint actions and interactions contribute to shaping
site-specific roles, tools, workflows and design concepts
in a dynamic and evolving way. For example, Rodil and
colleagues (2012:89-90) describe the process of codesigning
a 3D visualisation space for indigenous
knowledge in Namibia: “…it was all a big melting pot:
Where designer, the artefact and the space melt together
within the design process, where the object of design
becomes the tool for participation and where the designer
becomes a part of the community and the community
becomes designers.”
This process of local re-configuration can forge novel or
re-interpret existing tools and techniques. For instance,
Verran and Christie (2007:226) argue that video, a
representational technology in the Western tradition, can
be re-configured in indigenous contexts as performative
act. A video-recorded testimonial can be enacted as a
traditional Aboriginal performance, in which the
storyteller draws live connections to tribe histories and
geographies. This enables video as “technology of
representation” to be appropriated and re-configured as
“video as technologies of witness” (p. 221). This reconfiguration
marks a transition from a Western view of
knowledge as representation, to the indigenous view
embraced by the Yolngu aboriginal group, where
knowledge is a re-enactment, a performative act
circumscribed to a specific place and time (p. 219).