Reimagining participatory design

There is a pervasive sense in the community that participatory design (PD) has lost some of its clarity and identity. Experts recommend that PD should look forward, not backward, and specifically that it focus on what democracy means today and integrate new methods into PD. Today the political, social, economic, and technical environments within which discussions about participatory design take place have shifted significantly. The relations among labor unions, corporations, and governments have changed. Technology has facilitated the emergence of increasingly autonomous systems, which act and make decisions based on algorithms that few understand let alone shape, along with global networks and datasets of such scale that they can be managed only by computational systems.