Abstract

Democracies increasingly face challenges. Focusing on participatory democracy, we explore their intersection with the participatory design of digital technology that might strengthen rather than undermine local participatory democracy initiatives. Two influential examples found at the intersection of participatory design, technological innovation and democracy are discussed and contrasted with our approach to understanding this entanglement by looking into opportunities for small, local communities to develop and maintaining democratic discourse, trust, and good decision-making, potentially paving ways to mitigate democratic erosion at a larger scale. The work contributes by showing how participatory and transition design might be integrated. Further, we propose and exemplify a method – plurishop (a workshop considering multiple facets of a complex problem) – that enables design teams to consider several perspectives on citizens' engagement and use similarities and differences to better leverage the participatory design of digital innovations in support of participatory democracy.

Keywords

participatory democracy; participatory design; plurishops; transition design

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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The role of participatory transition design in mitigating erosion of participatory democracy

Democracies increasingly face challenges. Focusing on participatory democracy, we explore their intersection with the participatory design of digital technology that might strengthen rather than undermine local participatory democracy initiatives. Two influential examples found at the intersection of participatory design, technological innovation and democracy are discussed and contrasted with our approach to understanding this entanglement by looking into opportunities for small, local communities to develop and maintaining democratic discourse, trust, and good decision-making, potentially paving ways to mitigate democratic erosion at a larger scale. The work contributes by showing how participatory and transition design might be integrated. Further, we propose and exemplify a method – plurishop (a workshop considering multiple facets of a complex problem) – that enables design teams to consider several perspectives on citizens' engagement and use similarities and differences to better leverage the participatory design of digital innovations in support of participatory democracy.

 

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