Towards reciprocity in Participatory Design processes
Katrien Dreessen, Niels Hendriks, Selina Schepers, Andrea J. Wilkinson · 2020
Albeit achieving reciprocity is considered essential in much Participatory Design (PD) research, there remains a gap in the current literature on how PD practitioners working in community settings can obtain this. Through a literature review, we identified four characteristics of reciprocity that were used to analyse six different projects that all took place in the same neighbourhood and with the same group of designers. Starting from projects that failed in achieving reciprocal relationships, we distilled four defining and interconnected elements or handles for enabling reciprocity in PD processes. To attain reciprocity in a PD project, the project should be embedded in the community setting. This also implies that the involved designers need to have the willingness to be (or become) engaged, invest time and self-disclose personal information to build relationships within the community in order to establish a symbiotic agreement.