Who Designs? Technological Mediation in Participatory Design

This book chapter by Theodora Vardouli examines the idea of 'user participation' in design through the lens of technological mediation. It offers a parallel reading of proposals for technologically mediated user participation presented at the 1971 'Design Participation' conference of the UK Design Research Society, alongside more recent theories of technological mediation from science and technology studies (STS) and the philosophy of technology. Vardouli traces what she calls the 'infrastructure model' — the dominant approach to computationally mediated participatory design from the 1960s to the present — examining its history, conceptual assumptions and limitations, and how computational tools have been proposed to let non-expert users express their own design needs without an architect or designer as intermediary. It appears in the edited volume Empowering Users through Design: Interdisciplinary Studies and Combined Approaches for Technological Products and Services (ed. D. Bihanic, Springer, 2015). Credits: Vardouli, T. (2015). Who Designs? Technological Mediation in Participatory Design. En D. Bihanic (Ed.), Empowering Users through Design: Interdisciplinary Studies and Combined Approaches for Technological Products and Services (pp. 13–41). Valenciennes, Francia: Spring Intenational Publishing AG. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13018-7