Utopias of Participation: Design, Criticality,
and Emancipation
Shaowen Bardzell
Indiana University
919 E. Tenth St.
Bloomington, IN 47401
selu@indiana.edu
ABSTRACT
From its earliest incarnation in labor movements in
Scandinavia in the 1970s, Participatory Design has had an
emancipatory politics inscribed in it. As PD is
appropriated in other contexts, this emancipatory politics
can continue to be foregrounded or, as Bannon & Ehn
(2013) worry, it can be diluted into corporate practices of
“user-centered design.” One way to advance the
emancipatory politics in PD is to continue PD’s early
embrace of utopian thinking. Yet utopianism today has a
poor reputation, openly rejected by many activists. In this
keynote, I will revisit some of the criticisms of
utopianism. Next, I will explore an alternative framing of
utopianism—derived from feminism and science fiction
studies—that could productively inform PD, both
epistemologically and methodologically, in its most
openly political design goals. I will present some of the
ways I have tied to engage with these ideas through
design research projects ranging in scale from critical-
participatory studies involving local makers to designing
for and about the identities and aspirations of entire urban
populations.
Author Keywords
Participatory Design, utopia, feminist utopianism,
criticality, emancipation
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,
HCI): Miscellaneous.
PARTICIPATION AND FEMINIST UTOPIANISM
From Plato’s Republic through Thomas More’s Utopia, in
religious and secular society, in the East and in the West,
and through the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and
contemporary Feminism, people have always envisioned
utopias, seeking not so much to predict the future, but
rather to imagine a radically better one.
Utopianism is often dismissed as a kind of fantasy, a kind
of wishful thinking. Indeed, recent history shows how
moments of optimism turn dark: from the promise of
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189
scientific rationalism to its horrific realization in the
“Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” in Nazi Germany,
the scientific breakthroughs that gave us the atomic
bomb, the rise of global capitalism and in spite of its
promises the stubborn persistence of global economic
injustice, and finally to the looming threats of climate
change, mass extinction, and socioeconomic collapse.
Worse is the widespread fear that modern systems of
governance just aren’t up to the problems we face.
Yet utopianism is still alive. Perhaps Ernst Bloch was
right to characterize hope as a “drive,” comparable to
Freud’s love and death drives (Bloch, 1995). Today,
utopianism appears in numerous intellectual disciplines,
including philosophy, sociology, the arts, and in design.
Participatory Design has had a thread of utopianism
running through it since its early days, not just in its
conceptions of democratizing and improving the quality
of life in the workplace, but even more explicitly, as in
the very aim of the now-classic UTOPIA project (Bødker
et al, 1987). Yet some, such as Bannon & Ehn (Bannon &
Ehn, 2013), suggest that PD has become diluted in the
ensuing decades, losing its politics and perhaps some of
its bite.
Given the role of design in the social problems we face
(e.g., climate change), and given the scales at which
design projects and social formations and movements are
co-implicated, perhaps it is time once again to envision a
PD that is openly political, utopian even. What might that
look like?
In recent years, I have begun to stage a dialogue in my
research between feminist utopian thinking on the one
hand, and more political forms of design on the other,
critical and participatory design in particular. My
readings of PD in the past few years have suggested to me
several theoretical and methodological challenges that
could both inform and be informed by feminist
utopianism:
 The scale and scope problem: Whereas the
Scandinavian PD of the “classic era” was largely
situated in individual companies and comparatively
homogeneous societies, PD’s global move—to
corporate America and to the Global South—has
vastly expanded the epistemic and methodological
scale and complexity of PD processes and intended
sociocultural impacts.
 The postcolonial problem: As Irani et al (Irani et al,
2010) and others have noted, the fact that many IT
projects are funded, framed, carried out, evaluated,
and disseminated as “knowledge” by (predominantly)
 Western researchers suggests that much ICT4D
research has a postcolonialism problem.
 The participation problem: “Real participation” is
both pragmatically difficult to achieve and also
difficult to evaluate. It is complicated by subtle but
pervasive issues such as ideology; including
assumptions about race, gender, and religion; as well
as assumptions about “development,” “infrastructure,”
“literacy” and so forth.
 The apolitical problem: In the US especially, IT
projects—from funding proposals to research
outcomes—are often skittish about acknowledging
any politics, preferring to frame themselves as
apolitical, which can reinforce neo-liberal norms and
exacerbate the difficulties of registering marginalized
voices.
Feminist thought, including feminist pragmatism and
feminist utopianism, have also confronted issues such as
these. What are the consequences, to name one example,
when sociological research on drug use is funded and
framed by policymakers in the criminal justice system, as
opposed to research on drug use that is framed by drug
users? The former leads to the incarceration of bodies to
separate them from “good” society; the latter leads to
better treatments (Sprague, 2005). Yet drug users, as is
typical of marginalized groups, seldom have the agency
to propose, frame, carry out, interpret, or disseminate the
findings of research. What sorts of research
methodologies, feminists ask, can be designed to grant
agency to the marginal?
Certainly I don’t have the answers to these questions. But
increasingly clear to me is that one of the most important
insights of PD was its recognition—and moving to the
core of its methodology—that designs and social
formations are interrelated and often co-constitutive. The
design of a system, then, is not so far from the design of
social policy. As feminists have pointed out that the
injustices of social policies are felt in the bodies of those
they fail—through their incarceration, their dispossession,
their injuries, their boredom, and their pain—so by
implication bad designs can cause bodily hardship.
To explore these issues, I consider a couple of case
studies from my native Taiwan. Taiwan, like many
countries, has a creative industries policy initiative
intended to build the middle class, create good jobs, and
promote the country’s national standing. This policy
initiative has resulted in various grants and design
projects to stimulate Taiwanese craft, product design, and
IT manufacturing by creating parks and other recreational
areas. Yet areas designated for this government
investment are not uninhabited: poor seniors, squatters,
members of indigenous tribes, and other marginal groups
in some cases occupy these lands, setting up complex
conflicts that have no easy solutions. Using feminist
utopian theory as a guide, e.g., (Levitas, 2013; Moi, 1993;
Cornell, 1991), I analyze these cases to show how these
initiatives propose—and frequently fall short of—their
utopian hopes.
Stepping back, I identify a number of contact points
between feminist utopianism and PD, that is, issues that
190
both have confronted in a serious way. These include an
understanding of constituents or users as embodied, as
opposed to “disembodied ratiocinators” (Bannon &
Bødker, 1991); a sense that the responsibility to bring
about, rather than wait for, the future is our burden, today;
the development and presentation of alternative futures,
intended to “woo the consent” of other social groups; and
a commitment to an ethics of care instead of / in addition
to an ethics of justice, among others.
The human ability to design—cities, information systems,
societies—is a great source of hope and also a historical
cause of poverty, dispossession, social injustice, and
death. We can hardly stand by and wait for things to get
better. In the words of feminist utopian Selya Benhibib:
It is a matter of political imagination as well as
collective fantasy to project institutions, practices and
ways of life which promote non-violent conflict
resolution strategies and associative problem solving
methods. Far from being utopian in the sense of being
irrelevant, in a world of complete interdependence
among peoples and nations, in which the alternatives
are between non-violent collaboration and nuclear
annihilation, communicative ethics may supply our
minds with just the right dose of fantasy such as to
think beyond old oppositions of utopia or realism,
containment or conflict. (Benhabib, p.49)
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