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Participatory Design and "Democratizing Innovation"

Item

Title

Participatory Design and "Democratizing Innovation"

Abstract/Description

Participatory design has become increasingly engaged in public spheres and everyday life and is no longer solely concerned with the workplace. This is not only a shift from work oriented productive activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements, but also a new milieu for production and innovation and entails a reorientation from "democracy at work" to "democratic innovation". What democratic innovation entails is currently defined by management and innovation research, which claims that innovation has been democratized through easy access to production tools and lead-users as the new experts driving innovation. We sketch an alternative "democratizing innovation" practice more in line with the original visions of participatory design based on our experience of running Malmö Living Labs - an open innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and ideas evolve from bottom-up long-term collaborations amongst diverse stakeholders. Two cases and controversial matters of concern are discussed. The fruitfulness of the concepts "Things" (as opposed to objects), "infrastructuring" (as opposed to projects) and "agonistic public spaces" (as opposed to consensual decision-making) are explored in relation to participatory innovation practices and democracy.

Date

Series

Pages

41–50

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Resource type

Research/Scholarly Media

Resource status/form

Published Text

Scholarship genre

Empirical

Open access/full-text available

Yes

Peer reviewed

Yes

ISBN

978-1-4503-0131-2

Citation

Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., & Hillgren, P.-A. (2010). Participatory Design and “Democratizing Innovation.” Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference, 41–50. https://doi.org/10.1145/1900441.1900448

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