Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design

This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of key themes and agendas in contemporary Participatory Design across diverse disciplines, continents, communities, and practices. Building on Participatory Design’s core values of empowerment and democracy, the handbook explores how the field is developing and diversifying to address contemporary societal challenges in a global community.

Smith, R. C., Loi, D., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., Huybrechts, L., & Simonsen, J. (2024). Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Participatory Design. Routledge.

Towards Pluriversality: Decolonising Design Research and Practices

The promotion of Western epistemologies, one-size-fits-all technologies, and the often unquestioned transferability of design methods to diverse contexts, continues to suggest the idea of universality of design. Yet, contemporary challenges of social injustice, economic inequality, political instability, and ecological crisis pertaining to worldwide concerns, urge the design and tech communities to address aspects of power, equity, inclusion, and decoloniality in technology design research and practices. 

Smith, R. C., Winschiers-Theophilus, H., De Paula, R. A., Zaman, T., & Loi, D. (2024). Towards Pluriversality: Decolonising Design Research and Practices. CoDesign, 20(1), 1-13. 

Imagining Sustainable Energy Communities

In this paper, we scope energy community literature at ACM to identify design narratives that tell stories about how energy communities are imagined and why they are relevant. Through a critical discourse analysis, we describe how design narratives currently shape energy community research on sites, participation, and digital technologies. We use these stories to discuss and suggest three trajectories of how future HCI researchers and practitioners may explore alternative and sustainable visions of energy community futures.

Jensen, V. V., Laursen, K., Jensen, R. H., & Smith, R. C. (2024). Imagining Sustainable Energy Communities: Design Narratives of Future Digital Technologies, Sites, and Participation. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-17.

Sustainable Futures

Rethinking Design for Inclusive Digital Futures

Inclusive and sustainable digital futures call for fundamentally new design competences and practices. DCODE combines advances in engineering, social sciences and humanities to provide the necessary connection between human experience (one-to-one relations) and the societal system (end-to-end relations). In doing so, we position the crafting of agency as foundational to digital design today, just like function was critical to industrial design. DCODE is a Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN), of seven world-class higher education institutions working with stakeholders from industry, government, and civil society. The project addresses the knowledge gap for future design practices between technology design and the governance of the societal systems in which these technologies are embedded.   

Sustainable Futures

Future Urban Mobility: A Human Approach

The AHA project develops a human-centred interdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder methodology for co-designing future urban mobility services. People are at the centre of our agenda for the future. We have a responsibility to design for future lives, not just for future technologies and future cities. This focus helps us to understand people beyond being simply citizens (a cities focus) or technology users (a technology industry focus) to instead understand ourselves as People, with our everyday lives, our routines, jobs, social relationships with others, dogs, cats and everything else that makes up the complexities of real life. Many people live in cities and use transport, but neither cities nor transport define our lives.