Participatory design through a cultural lens: insights
from postcolonial theory
Henry Mainsah
Institute for Design
The Oslo School of Architecture and Design
E-mail: henry.mainsah@aho.no
ABSTRACT
This paper examines challenges faced in participatory
design’s confrontation with cultural complexity in
contexts of intercultural encounter and transnational
exchange. We argue that there is need for more elaborate
approaches to culture, technology, and participation in
relation to participatory design. By examining issues at
the crossroads between knowledge and power, agency
and representation we identify a variety of ways in which
Postcolonial Theory might inform Participatory Design.
Author Keywords
Participatory, postcolonial, transnational, position, power.
ACM Classification Keywords
Participatory Design, Postcolonial Theory, cultural
critique
INTRODUCTION
As our technologies increasingly travel across different
contexts and our participatory design (PD) methods,
principles and practices engage new constituencies the
issue of culture has grown to be a central concern. In this
article we argue that there is a need for more elaborated
approaches to culture, technology, and participation
particularly in relation to participatory design. We
suggest postcolonial theory (PoCo) as one cultural
approach that could be useful in framing central
challenges facing participatory approaches to design in
transnational and cross-cultural contexts.
PARTICIPATORY DESIGN AND CULTURE
As PD has grown in response to the increasing prevalence
of technology in work and leisure, it has encompassed
perspectives from post-structuralist inquiry, principally
from Feminism and Science Technology Studies (STS).
PD has developed principles and practices for engaging in
the constructing alternatives (Bødker et al. 2011) and also
changing relationships between work, institutional power
and participation. Today PD acknowledges that
technologies are taken up and increasingly taken apart by
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1
Andrew Morrison
Institute for Design
The Oslo School of Architecture and Design
E-mail: andrew.morrison@aho.no
people (Bäck et al. 2013) culturally and communicatively
in the context of social media, cloud computing and an
‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) populated by networked
products, services and interactions (Bannon & Ehn 2013).
Balsamo (2011) argues that design involves not just the
making of new artifacts but always involves the creation
of new cultural possibilities (Bagnara and Crampton-
Smith 2006, Morrison 2010). Thus everyone who
participates in the design of new technologies is also
engaged in the process of designing culture. Through the
practices of designing, cultural beliefs are materially
reproduced, identities are negotiated, and social relations
are codified (Julier 2000/2014). In this process, design
replicates previous meanings but at the same time it
makes possible the expression of new meanings; the
ability to understand culture in design research and
practice becomes even more important.
Yet in these important moves to expand the perspectives
and positionality of technology, ‘representation’ and
culture there remains little in the published PD research
that could be said to be informed by areas such as
Cultural Studies and other critical perspectives from the
humanities. Primarily, culture is concerned with the
production and exchange of meaning (Hall, 1997).
Cultural theory provides frameworks for understanding
the make-up of culture - the values, codes, narratives,
ideologies, discourses, and common sense, among other
things. Cultural theory offers models for understanding
the ways in which culture exerts influence on social
structure and social life. When relations between
participation and design are central one might have
imagined there would be more attention to the cultural
and communicative, issues of mediated representation, of
‘participatory cultures’ (Jenkins 2006) and in closer
relation to the cultural sector and ‘industries’ prevalent in
a wider design and design research domain. Cultural
perspectives are increasingly being taken up in research
on museums as institutions concerned with fostering
participant interaction. This work addresses
contemporary issues of emergent participatory techno-
cultures (e.g. Hayles 2012). Co-design and participation
are framed within a dialogical model of an engaged
participatory design involving assemblies of actors and
interested parties in the production of cultural expression
(Robertson et al. 2006). Such work builds on technical
expertise and knowledge of cultural histories and
representations from in digital cultural heritage within
ethnology and cultural historical analysis (e.g. Stuedahl
2009).

POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES
Postcolonial perspectives on culture aim to deconstruct
material and discursive legacies of colonialism (Radcliffe,
1999: 84). As a discipline of theory and criticism PoCo
an approach to thinking about how local practice operates
in contemporary transnational contexts affected by
histories, relations, and logics of colonialism.
Theoretically its cultural-linguistic and political economy
approaches draw on influences from poststructuralism
and Marxism (Blunt and Wills 2000). It emphasises
complex historicized encounters among actors with
different locations, varied forms of power, and different
paths to modernity and “development” (McEwan 2001).
PoCo theory destabilizes the assumption of western
knowledge as objective, authoritative and universally
applicable (Anderson 2002). In this regard the ‘colonial’
thus might be placed besides class, gender and race as a
major category of social and historical analysis. Thus
postcolonialism attempts to rewrite the hegemonic
narratives of time (history) and the spatial distribution of
knowledge (power) that constructs such binaries as
developed/developing, the west and the rest, first
world/third world. As McEwan (2001) points out, these
practices of naming are not innocent. PoCo challenges
the experiences of speaking and writing by which
dominant discourses come into being. They can be
considered as part of processes of “worlding” (Spivak
1990) or setting apart certain parts of the world from
others. PoCo perspectives problematize the way in which
the world is known, challenging the unacknowledged and
unexamined assumptions at the heart of western
disciplines through a radical reconstruction of history and
knowledge production (Guha 1982 in McEwan 2001). It
seeks to understand how location, social dimensions of
identity, and the global political economy differentiate
between groups and the opportunities they have for
development.
DESIGN AND THE POSTCOLONIAL
Robertson and Wagner (2013) have called for more
ethical approaches to PD that focus on a more reflexive
engagement with participants, agency, and emancipatory
participation. Bringing about more equal power relations
and actually fostering emancipatory participation remains
a central challenge for participatory design.
We are encouraged to see that Postcolonial Studies have
already appeared in recent PD conferences and literature,
though this is still within information and computational
systems design. Postcolonial critique is being taken up in
a limited extent in science and technology studies, Human
Computer Interaction, design and product history and in
participatory design (Moalosi et al. 2007; Meritt and
Bardzell 2011; Irani and Dourish 2009; Irani et al. 2010;
Meritt and Stolterman 2012). All these studies use
postcolonial perspectives to draw attention to concerns of
power, authority, legitimacy, participation, and
intelligibility in the contexts of cultural encounter within
design practice.
2
In the following we suggest four areas where a PoCo
approach might be fruitful to PD. Our choice of these
four areas reflects core areas of interest within PoCo
about issues of knowledge and power, agency and
representation. Drawing on these core interest areas, we
explore how they might inform PD research and practice.
Power relations
There have been increased calls within participatory
design literature to cast new critical light on power
relationships in design practices (Puri et al. 2004). One
aim of PoCo is to attempt to overcome inequalities by
opening up spaces for the agency of marginalized
peoples. Postcolonial theory offers a fluid and
contextualized approach to understanding the distribution
of power in PD practices. Meritt and Stolterman (2012)
point out that having a position as a project initiator
within a PD project with means and resources for
generating a technological intervention implies occupying
a position of dominance. However, power relations are
never fixed or static. Although the position of the
‘Western’ researcher/practitioner in a developing country
context is often seen as powerful, there are some
situations where power is displaced. Power relations are
fluid and are often negotiated across a complex web of
gender, class, race, and generation.
While participatory design intentionally addresses power
relationships, its focus does not extend beyond structural
power and voice at the micro-level in the design process
(Meritt and Stolterman 2012). Postcolonial theory offers
opportunities to generate systemic understanding of
political economies from local cultural worlds. Stories
about the networked travels of technological objects, for
example, reveal layers of information about the power
relations that enabled those networks.
Spatial metaphors and cultural essentialism
In descriptions of PD practices in contexts that differ
from our own, we encounter statements such as “In
Africa, participative community meetings are held under
the umbrella of…” or “the current African practice of
participatory community meetings” (Zorn et al. 2010:
273). Such descriptions often assume the existence of
“cultures” or practices “out there in Africa” that is alien
and completely unrelated to cultures “back here”. they
reflect views on culture as something that is fixed rather
than an active ongoing construction. In a world
characterized as increasingly diasporic, transnational, and
deterritorialized, , “back here” and the “local” depends on
context, the relationship between a particular social space
and the larger matrix of power and cultural relations in
which it is embedded, whether in the form of a nation, a
region, or another form of imagined community. The
spatialization of ‘here’ and ‘there’ is itself a colonial
legacy, where the colonial power observed from a
distance, a vantage point above the colonized. Said’s
(1993) notion of the contrapuntal emphasises
“overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” that
are important to think of together as registrations of a vast
social experience binding all its participants, even if
antagonistically and unequally. Arjun Appadurai observes
that the expansion of global capitalism has allowed for
culture and capital to flow from different centres, in
different directions, with often no clear centre and
periphery. Appadurai proposes to replace the centre-
periphery model with a complex matrix of overlapping
global cultural flows, which he categorises as
“ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes,
and ideoscapes” (1996: 37).
Irani and colleagues (2010) coined the term ‘postcolonial
computing’ to challenge the idea of simple cultural
binaries and taxonomic understandings of culture.
Highlighting the importance of situating domestic
technology in local culture, Bardzell et al. called for
interaction designers to ‘find constructive ways to engage
with users in such a way as to avoid oversimplified
constructs.’ While previous designations and dichotomies
that signal both spatial and temporal distance –
“developed” and “developing” world, “Africa and the
“West”, “out there” and “back here” – the postcolonial
perspective insists that the other world “out there” is
related to the world “back here” (Chambers 1996: 209).
For PD, this calls for increased attention to the language
of the texts of participatory design research - the
metaphors, images, allusion, fantasy and rhetoric and
what types they produce about peoples and places.
Design as culture
When technologists in PD, ICT4D, and HCI have faced
design problems in intercultural settings they often tried
to resolve these through models where culture is seen as
something stable enough to be a fixed variant. These
models often have origins in some forms of user-centred
design that strive to fit technologies to a stabilized notion
of the user (Philip et al. 2012).
PoCo highlights the importance of viewing design as a
cultural practice. Design objects are embedded in culture
and are always reaching out to various cultural contexts
incorporating different dimensions and resonances of
meaning. Design, thus, is always a practice of
representation where every structure of sensually
appealing materiality has an immaterial dimension in a
process of signifying meaning in a way that reflects and
affects culture. PoCo recognizes categories such as
female, African, or human do not exist independently of
technology. Rather what it means to be African or
‘Western’ is often deeply entangled with power,
institutions and technologies.
Incorporating a PoCo perspective into PD requires a
reconsideration of approaches that promise user-centred
design to develop design artefacts appropriate to people
located in some stable, coherent, and knowable cultural
space. Rather, it would require recognizing ‘indigenous’
or ‘local’ spaces as sites of contestation and cultural
innovation, where we should expect to find new forms of
technical practices emerging and moving from these
spaces (Philip et al. 2012).
‘De-centering’ PD knowledge
PoCo theory is concerned with the epistemological and
ontological status of the voices of subaltern peoples in
Western knowledge systems.
3
The question this brings in relation to PD is where in a
global context the ‘centres’ and the ‘peripheries’ of
knowledge production with PD are located today. PoCo
helps problematize the dominance of ‘western eyes’ in
PD research and it provides elaborate theoretical concepts
and analyses of the creative arts from which design
research may draw and engage with in dialogues
concerning making and participation. A PoCo approach
to PD will highlight the significance of knowledge from
the margins. bell hooks (1990) argues that the margins are
a site of ‘radical possibility’. From the margins emerges
hybridized indigenous knowledge that according to her
offers a unique perspective undistorted by the power and
prejudices of the centre.
Although PD stresses the importance of participation of
stakeholders in the process of design, these local
participants do not often take part in the process of
interpretation and analysis through which knowledge is
produced. As bell hooks (1990) points out, the experience
of the marginalized are used in the west without opening
up the process to their knowledges, theories and
explanations. When there is a meeting between the centre
and the margins, it is always according to terms set down
by the centre. bell hooks further argues that by retelling
her experience her voice is included, but only as an
example, or as data that the Western ‘expert’ alone can
interpret. This is precisely why PoCo attempts to recover
the voices of the oppressed marginalized and dominated.
Theorists (Spivak 1988; hooks 1990) have questioned the
ability of researchers and experts in the West to engage
with people elsewhere, in a manner that requires a de-
centering of themselves as experts. Spivak (1988) asks
whether ‘the subaltern’ can ever speak, so imbued must
she (the subaltern) be with the words, phrases and
cadences of Western thought in order for her to be heard.
Robinson (1994) challenges the privileged fixed position
of the researcher, to deconstruct the dualism between
“self-researcher” and the “other-researched”. He instead
opts for a “third space” where the subjectivities of both
researcher and researched are mutually constructed, and
meanings and interactions are also mediated, as is
knowledge itself.
CONCLUSION
We have argued for the need for more elaborate
approaches to culture, technology, and participation in
relation to participatory design. Postcolonial approaches
help explore how the production of knowledge on design
and technology appropriation is inseparable from the
exercise of power. With PoCo perspectives we can be
better equipped to loosen the power of Western centred
knowledge in PD and reassert the value of alternative
experiences and ways of knowing (Bhabha 1994; Fanon
1968; Spivak 1990). It offers an expansive understanding
of the potentialities of agency that can help inform and
generate changes in PD practice. A PoCo approach offers
new ways of conceiving the “participation” ethos of PD
where work with participants at grassroots level in
different cultural contexts contributes to breaking down
hierarchies of knowledge/power that privilege the
expert/outsider, undermine western imperialisms by
bringing new local knowledge to the fore in ways that
dismantle a priori categories of PD knowledge. PD
research in global contexts involves shifting the unit of
analysis from local, regional, and national to relations and
processes across cultures. Grounding analyses in
articular, local sites of PD practice is necessary, but
understanding the local in relation to larger, cross-
national processes is also important. Postcolonial theory
can contribute to the critical exploration of the
relationships between cultural power and global
economic power. Thus it points towards a radical
reclaiming of the political and ideological dimension of
PD.
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