The call to “participate!” is everywhere in contemporary society. Generally presented as a democratic, grassroots, open, bottom-up way of approaching a project, participation is gaining ground as an ideology that is increasingly open to challenge. Fig. 1 Fig. 5 Enjoying considerable success in every sector of activity, participation is no longer presented as the sine qua non for a politics calling for collective deliberation on the conditions and purposes of the project it serves, but as a universal, apolitical method that can meet the needs of the market and the State equally. It is irresponsible to deny the major threat of loss of meaning of participation caused by this situation. What is at stake is the hijacking of individual commitment, with a view to manipulating public opinion, manufacturing consent, controlling the spaces where the public expression of freedom is formed, and repressing subversive behaviour or the refusal to participate: in a word, the polis. 1
Design has a decisive role to play in this situation. Since the 1990s, participation as a method has been the main source of inspiration, promotion, and development, and brought into play in both commercial and alternative design. Commercial design makes it an efficient method for building involved, loyal, even captive consumers, avoiding making them feel that they are being coerced into an overly directive commercial process and exploited for their free labour, even if they are giving it freely. Alternative design makes participation an inclusive, emancipatory, autonomising experience within a collective experienced outside direct utilitarian and commercial relationships. In truth, behind these opposing categories, which appear clearly established and which can readily be called on to argue that commercial design imposes ersatz participation while alternative design offers the only authentic, acceptable form, lie a philosophical as-yet-unthought thought and a critical flaw that blurs the boundaries between the two forms, maintaining in practical terms the risk of illusion, exploitation, and control, endangering the urge to participate without which no collective human life is possible.
A philosophical critique of participation is vital to the objective of building up alternative design practices so that it does not inadvertently contribute to the loss of the desire to participate. It helps to understand the meaning of participation per se, i.e. what participation requires to exist in a non-perverse or non-contradictory manner. Such a critique proves all the more urgent since design, both commercial and alternative, has become the design of services, institutions and public policy. It is now directly involved in all aspects of political life. It takes charge in the sense both of the conception of the shared living conditions of individuals and also their singular manner of actualising them on a daily basis–beyond the explicit rules and modalities of representation of the collective will. Claiming to make the political “community” an object to be conceived, produced, and aestheticised by design may seem presumptuous at best and dangerous at worst, including if design lies along a third path that is not market- or State-driven, designing for and with its participants.
To understand participation and the political issues raised by co-design, it would be interesting to explore the various extant models, first and foremost the gradualist model initiated by Sherry Arnstein 2 in the 1960s, which is frequently reused and adapted. But rather than offering a systematic critique requiring a specific study of the model and its successors, looking at the lack of a theory of participation and analysing the limits of gradualism compared to holism and interactionism for instance, it is more constructive to offer something other than a new model: a philosophy of participation useful for co-design and the political critique it makes necessary for our common future and the future of commonality.
Towards a philosophy of participation
The path sketched out here to understand participation grew out of a combined reading of the philosophers Gilbert Simondon and Joëlle Zask. 3 Participation must be understood first and foremost as a process, i.e. as an operation within a problematic situation that furnishes a solution by transforming the stakeholders according to specific conditions. This process consists of three phases which are all possible experiences of participation: “taking part”, “bringing a part”, and “receiving a part”. The full experience of participation involves the three phases and takes on meaning in each phase, not only at the beginning or end. Participation is not a series of juxtaposed experiences devoid of consequences; it not only produces a solution to the problem, but also transforms the individual and the collective; the individual is transformed by the collective and the collective by the individual. It is therefore not so much a question of implication as of transformation, not so much about individuals as individuation, not so much about commonality as communalisation, not so much about “power over” as “power to”. This does not mean that this process-based approach negates the existence of structures, authorities, institutions, and conflictuality, but rather that these are both the results of the process of participation and the dimensions of the problematic situation.
This process-based approach also foregrounds the way that the effects of participation can reach far beyond the participants, producing transformation by amplification as the initial experience propagates from one individual to the next–if the conditions defining the problematic situation are common–or, rather, if they are analogous, i.e. shared according to differences inherent in the stakeholders, based on identities of relationship rather than relationships of identity. The full process is not, in this sense, an abstract ideal or an objective absolute at each participation, and experiencing a single phase is possible, positive, and sometimes necessary or inevitable due to the nature of the problem or the contingencies of the situation. Yet full participation, understood as the system of all the phases, the resonance of experiences, the synergy of actions, the differentiation of the self by others and of others by the self, is the very meaning of what is shared in participation.
It must also be added that the three phases form a cycle, not a linear unit where “taking part” is followed by “bringing a part”, then “receiving a part”. When participation is complete, “receiving a part” can trigger an entire new process of participation insofar as receiving a part, including when it is fair, equitable, and satisfying, contains–as a solution to the initial problem–the conditions of a new problem that can call for a new participation process and new stakeholders.
“Taking part”
“Taking part” should not be confused with “being part of”. Being part of a group, such as a work collective, a family, an ethnic group, a clan, a party, or a nation, means that the individual is part of an established group with predefined rules and, in most cases, preordained roles; the individual’s attitudes, behaviour, and values are directly influenced, or even determined, by the extant group. In this sense, the individual is part of a whole whose nature he does not modify significantly or directly, finding a place in a structure he must pass through and that leads him to what he can become in terms of the norms and values of the community he belongs to. In such cases, there is a direct affiliation to a stable, permanent structure and an expectation of reinforcement of its stability and permanence by following and transmitting its commonality in signs, rituals, narratives, interdictions, and taboos. The individual is second to the structure, placing the community’s interest ahead of his own self-interest, at the risk of destroying his own individuality in extreme cases, such as warfare, religious fanaticism, and radical activism.
In the case of “taking part”, the link between the individual and the community is different. The individual is not a part and the community is not a whole. There is a “play of interactions,” to quote Zask–a set of active, reciprocal relationships that constitute both individuals and groups. Since the group is not an established entity, it does not pre-exist the individual joining it; nor is the individual as stakeholder in the group yet constituted either. As Simondon writes, “the group does not consist of individuals gathered in a group by certain links but of individuals grouped, of group individuals”, 4 which means that it is not the group that brings the individual being an established personality like a ready-made coat;” nor is it the individual who 'with an established personality approaches other individuals with the same personality to constitute a group with them”. 5
For a better understanding of Simondon, we must begin with “the operation of individuation, in which individual beings are both the milieu and agents of syncrystallisation” 6 in that the group is a “syncrystallisation of several individual beings” and “syncrystallisation” can only take place if a potential for “crystallisation” exists both for the individual and for the group, hence if there is something 'non-individuated” in the individual and something 'non-grouped” in the group. Taking part is therefore the encounter between two crystallisations, the relationship of two relationships–that of the individual through their encounter with the group, and that of the group through its encounter with the individual. The group’s personality is thus the result of this “syncrystallisation”, the psychological and collective individuation that Simondon also refers to as 'transindividual”. The relationship between the group of belonging or interiority and the group of exteriority is not a relationship of closed sets, since beyond the two extremes (mentally deranged individuals outside groups and mystics beyond groups), everyday social life is the relationship between “the milieu of participation” and the “milieu of non-participation”. The everyday social life of individuals is the activity of taking part in the group of exteriority by the group of interiority, the group of interiority never being wholly cut off from the other groups since the individuals in groups are always plural, never living wholly within one single group of interiority.
In other words, we are not part of a “society,” we take part in processes of socialisation. These crystallise into groups, communities, and institutions when the urge to participate is maintained outside established functions, roles and aspirations. Something design can itself take part in by fighting against the irresponsibility of this urge, i.e. against the destructive lack of care imposed by participatory marketing by letting it be believed that the role of participant gives a decisional power. That is in fact a self-interested hijacking of the investment. Commonality is in this sense the result, not the starting point, of the community the community itself being an inchoative, perpetuated operation, always ongoing and open to exteriority. Taking part thus means being disposed to produce commonality and produce the community in common by individuating the self.
“Bringing a part”
“Bringing a part” is the second phase. It unites and prolongs the first, where the aim is to take part without necessarily bringing a part. While taking part and bringing a part are two different experiences, they cannot be set against each other, since the former is, as it were, the sine qua non for the latter but the reverse is not the case. We bring a part because we take part but we can readily take part without bringing a part. That said, bringing a part equally participates in all partaking, because at the very least we bring our bodies, in the sense that we make ourselves present by our own bodies whose appearance, stances, movements, clothing, and expressions translate a certain presence vis-a-vis the self, the place, and others. All participation is necessarily a contribution that is individual, non-individual and infra-individual (or rather pre-individual, since individuating the self requires a reserve of shared non-individuated potential). But this individual and non-individual contribution is not yet a “personal” contribution because it is involuntary. In a way, “bringing a part” takes on its full meaning when the contribution is personal, i.e. at the same time pre-individual, individual, and related to the group. It is personal when it is singular, more than a unit and more than an identity, i.e. irreplaceable, bound up with what the individual is in his own self and in the group, hence an opening of the common place of individual personalities and personalisation of the community.
“Bringing a part” in this sense means “contributing”, not in the sense of being constrained to pay a tribute to an institution by authority and force, or in the sense of being affiliated with a given structure to guarantee its longevity with donations or support, but in the sense that the aims, methods and interests of the group and community are called into question, deliberated, and transformed. In the contribution, the individual is the element, agent, and result of that which is brought. Contributing is not simply depositing something that is then given over to others; it is becoming an individual by individuating. It means appropriating the other, appropriating the self, by the act of bringing, i.e. by expropriating the self, somehow becoming extrinsic to the self and not the owner of what we have, appropriating what we become with and by others. Participating by con- tributing on an “individualist” basis to impose our own mode of representation, to promote our own self-interest, is a closed form of participation (the most widespread in a work context), quasi-contradicting the open form, which is a contribution in which non-congruent, even conflictual, aims, modes and interests can co-exist. This open form is not self-destructive or incapable of producing coordinated collective action, it is merely a mode of participation which preserves tensions, i.e. the concrete whole shared in the solution found to a problem, which can be reactivated when the situation changes.
This understanding of the nature of contribution clearly requires opening up to the disturbance of beliefs, to respect divergent viewpoints, to share the incompatible, to “dissensus”, 7 to borrow Jacques Rancière’s term. It also requires above all an education, i.e. the acquisition of affective and emotive sensitivity to the necessity of contributing, and a cognitive and operative construction providing the means to do so (as India’s Barefoot College International does Fig. 3 to emancipate women living in poverty by designing energy systems). In a hyper-technological context like the one imposed by today’s society, where the digital realm has become the associated milieu of our lives, this education in how to contribute is vital. 8 It should not only prepare us to contribute by teaching us to read, write, calculate and code, but it should also furnish future contributors with a genuine technological culture for as long as the individual is studying. This education in how to contribute (by technological culture) should at the same time be a contributive education (in technology) rather than hasty training in a specialised trade that matches the labour market and forces the individual to submit to the imperatives of consumption (and its control techniques). As an aesthetic and technological practice, design has the power of raising awareness, guiding, and producing: in other words, a power of emancipation.
“Receiving a part”
“Receiving a part” is the third phase. It splices into the contribution phase as its immediate extension. If a contribution takes place, if something meaningful and appropriable is brought, reception also takes place. “Receiving a part” is symbolic in the sense that the symbol is, at the point of origin, that which is received by two partners after being divided, each part being complementary to the other and needing to be joined with it to be whole. The received part is thus a symbol of exchange and the community of sharing; it is the sharing of a unit calling for its complement to exist in the fullest sense of the term. Strictly speaking, the received part is thus the relationship itself rather than the object. The object is that which is received but which gestures not only to the other who received the complementary part but also, first and foremost, to the relationship that establishes them as reciprocal to each other. That which is received is only ever partially received, and that which is given is only ever partially given: the real donation is the relationship established between giver and receiver, which can be transmitted beyond the individuals initially involved across time.
This symbolic character leads to the fact that receiving a part does not exactly mean receiving our part in the sense of receiving that which is proper to us and unshared. There is a difference between receiving a part and receiving that which is due in keeping with what we expect, what is agreed on and what is ours by right. Receiving a part is richer than any relationship of conformity; it goes beyond matching expectation and gratification. In receiving a part, we can receive something we were not expecting, and still be perfectly satisfied with it. In reality, participation always brings the unexpected. No expectation can anticipate the nature or moment when that which is given is given and is given at the right time. This is the phenomenon of the individuation of the self by the collective and of the collective by the self. In this sense, receiving a part always happens by surprise and gives itself fully after the event. It therefore does not close a gap by filling it or honor a debt by paying it off. It comes in excess of participation above all expectation of a good share which was the object of an agreement after a discussion, a deliberation, a negotiation, signing off the donor’s undertaking to the receiver. That is not to say that all undertakings are rendered null and void by participation, quite the reverse; the undertaking is deeper and harder to follow through, since it implies a new relationship to the part donated and the part received. Receiving a “fair part” is therefore no longer simply a question of equality and equity, but of the ethics of reciprocity, i.e. of respect, maintenance and development of the relationship rather than seeking static equilibrium and allocation based on the distribution of parts and gratifications (especially when they are calculated to strengthen the consumer’s attachment and dependence). The fair part therefore means giving by giving of ourselves without knowing all we are giving or all we are receiving, except for the requirement to dedicate our energies to the relationship thereby generated (with loving relationships as the highest instance).
In this sense, receiving a part demands availability, i.e. the capacity and openness in virtue of which that which is sent, given, transmitted, from hand to hand, peer to peer, individual to individual, can be received, i.e. accepted, acknowledged, appropriated, for itself and as a gesture reciprocally involving giver and receiver. Such availability for receiving calls for presence, attention, time, and mutual understanding that means we must be ready to receive and know how to receive, which requires a particular psycho-social stance. In turn, this stance requires an education preparing us for this reception, giving it meaning that is itself shareable, without which it is consent imposed by an apparatus of extortion. This apparatus prescribes, forces, and constrains rather than incites, guides, and opens up to that which gives of itself in participation. Here education is not the distribution of parts planned by schools, the State, and the market. It is the development of an availability to receive a part and to become sensitised to sharing that which is nobody’s by right and without which it is impossible to live together, to form an open community, capable of inventing sociability.
Furthermore, there can be no full reception without donation, but there is no donation without previous reception. Reception means opening up to ourselves by giving ourselves to others according to a culture, without being assigned an identity specific to a territory, blood, or set of codes and rituals to preserve. That which is received in such a logic is not a “good” in the sense that a good is divisible and can be distributed in equal shares. Nor is it a “benefit” in the sense of a social advantage or economic gain obtained by bringing a calculable quantity of matter, money, knowledge, or power. It is a requirement to renew psychic and collective individuation, a preparation for invention, which is always and simultaneously anticipation and memory. In this sense, receiving is no longer an extension but the marker of a new participation, taking a new part starting from that which is not individuated within us or grouped among others. But this concatenation requires us to take care that the automatisation of presence and affects does not suppress the desire to give and receive, i.e. to participate. These now tend to be imposed by algorithms that govern the whole of human psychic and social life–something design can help to transform by de-automatising habits by inventing critical practices.
Co-design and the critique of participation
What about design? Can it integrate this theoretical background and put forward a practice of critical participation? Above all, if design is defined as “co-design,” it must break free from the quest for universality and permanent innovation, opposing the ideology of the social yield that engenders the obligation to become part of rather than to take part, to add rather than to contribute, to profit by rather than to renew participation. In other words, co-design must affirm itself as something entirely different to “design thinking”. 9 This is a pseudo-inclusive, short-term method that upholds the consumerist model in Stiegler’s 'widespread proletarianisation”. 10 This is losing us savoir-faire, savoir-vivre and savoir-être by liquidating the urge to participate, collective practices and care for the common good. This is why co-design, in line with the requirement of participation, strives to promote and engender solidarity, i.e. to initiate and guide the urge to come together to conceive, produce, and exchange, while maintaining the capacity and possibility for deliberating on the conditions and aims of the expression of this urge. This implies fighting for a long-term investment by all in favour of the incalculable wealth of sharing our urges. Yet such an investment calls on us to rethink design, its industrial and non-industrial history, its relationship to work and consumption, its capitalist, subsidised economic model, its technicity and spirituality, its authority and utility–in short, we need to rethink its political role.
“Co-design” cannot in this sense be based on “good intentions” and not bring in critical reflexivity vis-a-vis its own conditions, means, and aims; failure to do so exposes it to becoming naively complicit in the dominant model at best, and an accelerator of its effectiveness at worst. This can occur in two ways: either by instrumentalising its methods via participatory or collaborative marketing aiming to involve consumers in the definition and distribution of a business’ output by means of crowdsourcing, community management and gratifications whose benefits include strengthening the brand, increasing customer loyalty, and recruiting new prospects via influencers; or by delegation from public institutions via “socially innovative” design calling on users to get involved in planning public services that may enable the State to limit its presence and depoliticise projects. 11
This is why “co-design” demands a critique of expertise and use. This critique is necessary, since “co-design” calls into question the traditional expertise attributed to a specialist with mastery of a rules-based skill set, i.e. the “professional” designer. This understanding of the designer’s expertise is problematic in that it more or less explicitly maintains the opposition between conception and production, production and use, use and evaluation. It hands the designer the largest share of knowledge and the best share of decision-making. Feedback on user experience is rarely a factor in transforming the method and rules proper to the “profession” and the concrete participation in the processes of conception and production mostly being on lines of information and consultation rather than long-term autonomy. Where there is such involvement, either the user adapts to the given framework according to established variants, or there is a superficial “personalisation” of elements selected from limited options, or an algorithm spits out an automatic suggestion imposing the best choice based on statistical resemblance.
But “co-design” also challenges the expertise of participation. “Co-design” does not merely involve users who will receive what has been done to serve a given purpose, or even what has been done for them; it involves individuals, or rather people, whose existence is far richer than the feeling of being useful to society thanks to utilities designed for them. Insofar as the institutionalisation of “co-design” tends to recreate a “profession” with its own tested methods, rules, and competences, the risk is reducing user participation to a predefined role and the designer to an expert skilled in obtaining positive contributions for the commissioning body (as Manzini suggests). 12 Rather than being both means and end, participation can then swiftly be reduced to a simple means for gathering information, gaining followers, strengthening loyalty, increasing profits, and boosting the designer’s, institution’s, or company’s profile.
The issue at stake in “co-design”, then, is initiating, maintaining, and developing cycles of participation and integrating people as plural singularities rich in potential individuation, i.e. able to acquire the necessary skills for feeling, contributing, and receiving, including in situations that seem to make this challenging such as disability, dependency, and disease. In situations where vulnerable people could participate, it might be thought that such participation is compromised by their physical, mental or social frailty. If they are able to communicate, they do in fact display genuine “expertise” in their own situations. They have a greater need of bringing their part to improve their lot than of obtaining aid from external experts who do not experience what they do on a daily basis. 13 In other words, the issue at stake in “co-design” is autonomy, i.e. the acknowledgment of each individual’s capacity to decide by and for himself what is good for his own life, and also the need to make individual’s autonomous through education, which is more than passing on knowledge and transmitting values in that it teaches us to transform ourselves with others, to participate fully in forming our personalities through forming the community by means of practices.
This issue of education for autonomy takes on full meaning in the hyper-technological context where the trend is towards dependency, even slavery, by the full closure of the machines forming the technological milieu of our lives–i.e. interconnected computers. Illich, Simondon and Stiegler rightly demand autonomy by means of opening up to machines and of opening up machines (as shown by the Fairphone smartphone Fig. 2Fig. 4, the Wikipedia encyclopedia, the Mastodon social network, and the Linux operating system, in terms of digital technology), because it is decisive in fighting against the principal source of contemporary alienation: a culture ignorant of and hostile to technologies that impose automatised, commodified participation without consent. 14 The role of design is decisive here, as McCarthy and Wright show, particularly in transforming human-machine interaction by a “critical dialogue” that assumes the 'dissensus”, indeterminacy and incompleteness of the participative experience in technological design. 15
Towards a mesopolitics of co-design
In this sense, “co-design” calls for a co-design of “co-design”, as it were, in which the designer’s role is simultaneously versatile, distributed (Manzini) and constantly enriched by critical reflection on the various forms of apparatus on offer, their motives, conditions, means, and aims, in the service of autonomy and emancipation. But the call goes far beyond design as a profession, discipline, or field; the aim being to re-politicise design and, through it, form and technology, sensibilities and imaginaries. In other words, designing a new politics for a new way of life. This is a mesopolitics, in the sense of a politics of milieus, i.e. acknowledging that there are no individuals or communities without milieus and that living together cannot exist without a sensibility, organisation, and consideration of our relationship with them. This also means there is no autonomy without heteronomy. Autonomy is only truly open, hence conscious and free, if it incorporates knowledge of the conditions of its own formation and maintained existence, i.e. its relativity to the milieu without which it cannot exist. In this sense, true autonomy is never pure: it is always not only exposed to heteronomy and therefore a form of closure and dependency (under lifelong tutelage due to laziness and cowardice, as Kant would say). 16 Autonomy as a stake of co-design is therefore not a question of pure, ideal, utopian autonomy, but of impure, concrete, situated autonomy, coupled with heteronomy, a blend of auto-heteronomy where the implied alterity is both the alterity of the promise of emancipation and the threat of subjection.
This “mesopolitics” is something other than the set of knowledge and techniques for manipulating the milieu rather than individuals, to modify human behaviour with a view to obtaining cohesion, obedience, and stability by means other than direct, violent force or legitimate public authority. 17 In other words, the aim is not to return to the program begun in the eighteenth century, described by Foucault, 18 which consists in governing individuals by establishing milieus for free circulation and exchange rather than prescribing behaviours (for example by urban planning, modernising household equipment and furniture, public hygiene, electrification and automatisation in farming and industry etc.). This disciplinary mesopolitics consists in developing a political technology drawing on the new bodies of knowledge in biology and (positivist) mesology to let humans live and act, intervening rather in their milieu than imposing behaviour by controlling and coercing their bodies. This mesopolitics is the polar opposite to the biopolitics that seeks to hold power over life by controlling its milieus; it seeks rather to care for milieus to preserve and develop the urge to participate and the emancipatory effect of satisfying the urge.
While Berque and Simondon have not developed a true mesopolitics per se, but rather an ethics of milieus, 19 a “mesopolitics” of participation can indeed draw on their theories of the milieu, which cannot be reduced to a rational, managerialist theory of the environment that can be studied, exploited, and transformed to ensure population control and guarantee social peace without overtly wielding domination by widespread ambiance design. A mesopolitics of co-design is therefore not a call to govern milieus or to improve governance of individuals by milieus, which have become almost wholly digital and automatised, or at least highly anthropised, but to come together to care for milieus as the precondition for existence of individuals and as the meaning of communities.
Consequently, maintaining a model that destroys the relationship with the milieu (mesocide) simply means depriving each individual not only of the feeling of existing, but the very possibility of existing as a singular being beyond mere survival, i.e. of participating in the meaning of life by means of a full, individuating, personalising and communalising participation. Living together to participate in the meaning of life is the vocation of all “politics”. A mesopolitics must be capable of defining, organising, and preserving the conditions of a wholly human existence, i.e. a sensitive, open community that can only give of itself and perpetuate itself by its ecological, technological, and symbolic participation in the world’s perennity and diversity. The only way this can take place is by maintaining a sensitivity to milieus, by educating people in a fully rounded culture, and developing capacities for shared deliberation on the ways and means to achieve it. If an imperative is then to be expressed, it is not an injunction to participation that challenges design to order individuals to consent to major projects designed for them; the imperative is rather a co-design that is critical, reflexive, situated, curative, aesthetic, and technological, maintaining the urge to participate and deliberate reason as the motive of a collective life devoted to the common good. Reinventing a way of life.
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