When the designer and the user disagree
Most writing about participatory design is about getting people into the room: workshops, sticky notes, co-creation sessions. That is the easy part. The hard part is what happens when a participant tells you how their world works, and your training tells you something different.
I am working on a project about equity with young people from a low-income community. This tension is what it keeps teaching me.
Participation is not the same as power
Designers like to say they design “with” people. But who chose the participants? Who decided the place, the time, and the questions? Who made sense of the answers between sessions? Critics of participatory design point out that when the designer holds all of these decisions, the process can keep the designer in control even while looking open. Inviting people to a workshop is not the same as sharing the decisions.
I have found this uncomfortable to admit, because I do have power in the process. I picked the activities. I am the one writing the brief. The honest starting point is to say so, and then ask what I can do about it.
Two kinds of knowledge are being mixed up
The tension, I think, comes from treating “knowing” as one thing. Participants and designers know different kinds of things.
Participants are experts on experience: what their mornings are like, what feels fair, what feels far away, what they worry about. No designer can overrule that, and it should carry more weight than any framework I bring.
Designers bring explanation: ideas about why things are the way they are, like how neighbourhoods get resources, how caste and class shape access, or how a system fails. This knowledge is useful, but it is a lens, not a fact about their lives.
The trouble starts when we blur the two. In my project, young people compared their area with a wealthier one nearby and explained the difference in their own terms. Some of their explanations pointed to the government, and some blamed people in their own area. I am trained to look for structural reasons. If I correct them, I stop listening. If I accept every explanation as the final truth, I leave out what I know could help them see their situation differently.
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A way to work with the tension
What has helped me is to be strict about which kind of knowledge I am dealing with.
- Their experience is not up for debate. I take it as data, even when it surprises me. How a person explains their world also tells me how they have been taught to see it, which is valuable.
- My explanations are offered, not delivered. I bring them as hypotheses and add them next to the participants’ own, then see what they do with them. If an idea does not fit their lives, I drop it.
- They can overrule me. For this to be real, I have to change something in the project when they do. The brief for this project changed because of what the young people said, and it is now about how they want to see and be seen in public, on their own terms.
I am not claiming this solves the power problem. A designer who facilitates is never neutral. But it makes the imbalance visible, which is a start.
What this does to the design
Once you work this way, the output changes. It stops being a clever answer I bring to a problem, and becomes something participants can look at and say, “that is what we meant.” That is a much higher bar than “they liked it.”
It also changes what a designer is for. In my view, the job is not to be the expert who knows best, or the facilitator who has no opinion. It is to be honest about what you bring, open about what you do not know, and ready to be changed by the people you work with.
The question I would ask of any co-design project
Whose explanation is this design built on? If the answer is only the designer’s, the participation was decoration. If it is only the participants’, the designer’s skill has gone unused. The good work happens in the argument between the two, when each side has room to say, “that is not how I see it.”
