Citizen Engagement in ICT Design: The Challenge - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 132

leverage point lies in acting within the spheres where we have knowledge
and authority. (…) These sites of local participation offer both opportuni-
ties and responsibilities for shaping the way technology works in our
lives .” (Nardi and O'Day 1999).
7.2.4 A Participatory Approach to Design
Enid Mumford reminds us that “ the one thing that can be said with cer-
tainty about participation is that it is not a new concept, although it may
sometimes have been given other names such as democracy, involvement,
sharing, co-operation, etc. The Greeks used it to describe a certain kind of
decision taking. For them a decision was participatively taken if the an-
swer to the question 'who takes it?' was 'more or less everybody'. This
kind of democratic decision taking contrasted with meritocratic forms in
which decisions were taken by an elite, and with an autocratic form in
which they were taken by one person ” (Mumford 1983).
In the specific context of design, Participatory Design (PD) has emerged
as a recognized body of practice. The key objectives of participatory de-
sign are to ensure that those who will be impacted by a system are empow-
ered to participate directly in decision-making about that system, not only
in relation to computerized aspects but also in the design of work systems
and policies. Muller (2002) characterizes the PD field as follows: “ re-
searchers and practitioners are brought together - but not necessarily
brought into unity - by a pervasive concern for the knowledge, voices
and/or rights of end-users, often within the context of software design and
development, or of other institutional settings (e.g. workers in companies,
corporations, universities, hospitals, governments). Many researchers and
practitioners in PD (but not all) are motivated in part by a belief in the
value of democracy to civic, educational and commercial settings - a
value that can be seen in the strengthening of disempowered groups (in-
cluding workers), in the improvement of internal processes, and in the
combination of diverse knowledge to make better services and products ”
(Muller 2002).
The approach emerged in Scandinavia in the 1960s, initially in building
design (Granath et al. 1996), but was then adopted by a series of projects
undertaken by the Norwegian Computing Centre in the 1970s and 1980s
(Keul 1983; Thoresen 1992; Clement and Van den Besselaar 1993). In
these projects, researchers worked with trade unions to provide them with
knowledge about how the use of new information technology could affect
their working conditions. The aim was to encourage the unions to develop
and implement their own technology control activities and policies. These