DISPOSICIÓN N.º 6/DGIUR/

In sub-studies III and IV, I focused on researching workshops from the participant’s perspective. I was interested in learning how participants understand and experience participatory processes and workshops. The data was collected in ARTSMO and GLiV. The results were published in two articles. Article III: ‘Narrative Identities in Participatory Art and Design Cases’ focused on how equal engagement happens in workshops. It questioned the prevailing ways of discussing complex participatory processes through process and role descriptions and proposed narrative identities as an alternative way of looking at art and design cases. Article IV: ‘Workshops as a Catalyst for Common Good’ explored the meaning of workshops for participants and reflected through their experiences which kind of collaborations, aims and practices workshops can catalyse. The experiences were researched from an individual’s perspective as well as from a community’s viewpoint.

Every participant brings their unique individual talents, skills, motivations and interests to the workshop. Through the research, identity and narratives were

found as enabling viewpoints that allowed plural understandings and experiences to co-exist in collaborative design as well as in research. Individuals will not experience workshops similarly, and that is one of reasons for the richness that comes from co-designing. Somers (1994, p. 635) stated that we cannot assume that people with similar attributes will share common experiences of social life, let alone share common forms and meanings of social action.

For an individual, identity is ever changing and balanced with multiple belongings. Through narratives, it is possible to reflect identities and their formation. In a workshop context, it is interesting how identities are individual but yet formed and changed in relationships. One’s identity in the story is never truly their own due to being articulated ‘with and among others’ (Freeman, 2001, p. 289). On the one hand, identity is something that distinguishes us from other people, but it also might become about identification with others whom we assume are similar to us (Buckingham, 2008, p. 1).

Through narrative identities, I with my co-writer of Article III, Daria Akimenko, found possibilities to focus on participants’ more holistic portraits and therefore on the holistic experience of the cases, interventions and workshops. This was evident, for example, in the fact that participants of GLiV were discussing in the interviews the community by using everyone’s first names, not the titles or roles they initially used when they got involved in the contest. If we can find ways of fitting design processes and ever-developing participants’ identities together, more equal learning, discussion, creation and decision-making can happen.

Through the questionnaire, I found that all the participants had a more positive view towards change after the workshop than before it. The workshops served as a platform for participants to get confirmation of their individual perspectives and ideas, but at the same time, they helped these to be shared. Overall, the questionnaire revealed that an individual and even rather short design workshop can increase the sensation of participation and ownership towards change in participants. Although it is hard to sustain this sentiment, workshops have the power to affect people’s perceptions towards themselves as well as towards making change.

The narrative identity approach can facilitate and enhance individuals making decisions about their surroundings, enabling their transition from being a participant to having active agency and an impact in the process. Through narratives, people make sense of their own life situations and explore their positions in the community. In participatory processes considering the plurality of identities, social empowerment can also emerge from a deeper understanding of individual identities in relation to others.

The community perspective in my research focused on communities of practice, as stated earlier. Thus, the focus is not so much on stakeholders having different needs but more on understanding and valuing a group of people who are finding

together a mutual goal and then working in a team in order to achieve it. The cases can be started by communities, and the first task might be the discovery phase of what the community is interested in doing together. For a designer, this means that there is seldom a design brief to follow, but it is more often formed during the collaboration and narrowing down as the process progresses.

One of the findings in my research is that, in workshops, design is not practiced by a single person or professional but by a group of people or a community. Workshops can transform the way we interact with each other during co-design. They offer a platform for doing together where a community of practice can be formed. In workshops, people meet and work together without paying too much attention to their background, education, titles or life situations as they focus on collaborative making. Collective ‘reflection-in-action’ supports mutual learning (Robertson & Simonsen, 2012, p. 5) during the design process. This creates the potential for increasing individual and communal well-being during the collaboration as well as in the solutions created in the workshops.

From a participant’s perspective, workshops can also help in conflict situations, such as discussing what concept to choose for further development. The workshops that are included in this research also dealt with negotiations of what would be a good or the best solution, how it could be good for the majority and in which way to achieve that. To explain what is designed in workshops and why communities are motivated to work together, I have used the term ‘common good’. The design practice of a community is characterised by negotiations of common good where individual, economic, environmental, communal and political issues are discussed and considered as part of the processes and outcome. Workshops and design methods, like storytelling or service walkthroughs, can allow us as individuals and as a community to outline and visualise what common good could mean in the future. Through action, it is also possible to comprehend more deeply the effects of a certain idea on one’s own identity and narrative as well as on those of the communities.