When did participatory design emerge?' you hear answers like 'Well, in the 1970s, I think, with Collaborative Design in Scandinavia.' Some people might say, 'Okay, 1960 with Karl Linn,the father of Participatory Architecture' or Jane Jacobs with a wonderful book that critiqued the centralized version of urban planning and planted the seeds for participatory urban planning.' Some people might even say, 'Well, you could go into the 1940s with the Participatory Action research models from Europe.' But notice, whether '40s, '60s or '70s, the arrow – all three
of those arrows on the right are right on top of each other. Because we're saying that for 300,000 years there has been no participatory design. Really? What if design is just in its simplest form some kind of time of taking in information, some time of coming up with an idea or multiple
ideas and then some time where you implement those ideas or test them? And that when you do that in community, it's participatory design. Well, if that's the case, I'm willing to bet that there are many, many more examples of participatory design before the 1940s. We could go to ancient Mesopotamia where civilization was booming and burgeoning and they were dealing with the problem of how do we grow enough food for all these people and we keep increasing the numbers? And when it rains too much, the crops areruined,
and when it doesn't rain enough, the crops are ruined. So, they built these large storage basins and then they dug these things called canals that connected these large storage basins of water to each of the farms. And they built up the banks and sides of the river. And so, yes, that design – the canals – began to proliferate around the world, but it first arrived as a community answer to a community problem. But even if you go back to 3000 years ago with the actual first codification of the
Ayurvedic or the Siddha traditional systems of medicine, they were only encoding folk medicine which had been practiced for thousands of years before that. So, when we come back and we look at this timelinethat we had, we realize: Oh, wait a minute, participatory design has been happening the *entire* time; there is no separate start of participatory design, different from the start of communities. In fact, when we look at the animals who also practicedesign or even when we look at the hidden life of trees where trees below ground are locking roots and sending signals
through mycelia warning of impending danger, using this particular design, in order to grow greater resilience, this even goes beyond Homo sapiens. 2.6 million years ago, the first sharpened stones. If you look on the left, people would take these rocks and just hitit and create these sharpened stones. And that eventually evolved to stone hand-axes about 1.6 million years ago. And then what we call knapping tools about 400 to 200,000 years ago, and eventually on the right what you see there are cutting blades
that emerged around 80,000 to 40,000 years ago,but it didn't stop there. They then went on to sharp micro blades around 11 to 17,000 years ago. And then eventually 12,000 years ago we have the first axes and chisels, and all of this, which you might say is 'OK, it's experimentation',is a type of research. They're trying things and seeing if they can make this tool betterto do what they needed to do and when we look at the history of participatory research we realize: Wait a minute,
there is no separate beginning of participatory research that is separate from the beginning of communities; communities have always been doing this and even before the emergence of Homo sapiens. We can beencouraged by the words of research justice which says there aredifferent types of knowledge. And I think one of the problemsand the reasons that we think,'Oh, participatory research, participatory design is new' isbecause we don't understand all the different types of knowledge that exists; besides mainstream institutional knowledge or third-person knowing, we have lived experientialknowledge;
we have cultural knowledge, spiritual knowledge, and research justicesays all of these knowledges are *equal*. And when we begin to understand the plethora, the diversity of knowledges, it actually begins to transform our definition of research from investigation to a *pluriverse* of definitions. And the *purpose of research* to being, to establish a fact,
or to reach a conclusion, then becomes transformed to a pluriverse of purposes. And so, the next question for us then is, 'Well,what is participatory design?' It goes by many names, with co-operative design, collaborative design,co-design, etc. People usually mean the same thing. And I found that the same things that theymean fall into four categories. Number one, they mean *inclusion*, because I'm includingthe perspectives of people through research,
I call them *research participants*, I am doing participatory design. The second is a *method*. Let's do a usability study; no, let's do participatory design. The third definition I'm seeing is a *way of doing a method*. We could do a design studio. Oh, what if we did a design studio but we invited the community members to take part in the design studio? And the fourth that I've seen is a *methodology*, and when I say 'methodology', I mean either a collection of methods or a set of guiding principles or philosophy that
help you to choose a particular method at a particular point within a process. But whether you mean inclusion of perspectives, method, way of doing a method or methodology, in all of these ways of defining participatory design,the designer and design researcher is centered. And it used the predominant model of designer as facilitator, in which we empower the community in participatory design.