Collectives and Participatory Design

Participatory Design’s interest in the formation and organisation of collectives can be traced to the enhanced field’s engagements with complex realities in urban, suburban and rural environments. Participa-tory Design processes in these contexts deal with contested issues, such as mobility or migration, and there is a great need for more solidarity and collective understanding and actions around these topics. Participatory Design researchers have therefore strengthened their capabilities to design, experiment and work with the ongoing dynamics, diverse experiences and views of collectives on matters they care for. They build upon Participatory Design’s political ethos informed by discourses in agonism. This chapter focuses on the question of how Participatory Design has supported and can support the formation and organisation of collectives around questions that emerge in urban, suburban and rural environments with close attention to its politics. The term ‘collectives’ is used to underline the complexity of human and more-than-human actors, the latter being actors who are part of lifeworlds, such as trees, birds, technologies or buildings. In the introduction, this chapter builds further on the 2013 Participatory Design Handbook, which highlighted ‘Community-based Participatory Design’ outside the formal organisational structures where Participatory Design initially grew. Followingly, we discuss how this move outside organisational settings has contributed to concepts such as collectives, infrastructuring, commoning and institutioning and how they shape today’s research and practices. We will also engage deeper into examples of recent inquiries on Participatory Design and the formation and organisation of collectives to end with a discussion on Participatory Design and the formation and organisation of collectives.