What is it about?
Participatory design highlights the complexity of individuals' identities, social connections, power relationships to one another. Ideal participation assumes fairness and transparency, however, fair and transparent participation seldom happens. In this paper, I outline participatory barriers with a marginalised community living in a slum in Mumbai, India from ethnographic studies with residents within that community.
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Why is it important?
There is a lack of literature around the work required to contextualise the barriers towards equitable participation in participatory design. This paper outlines the participatory challenges with a marginalised community from Mumbai, India. Data was gathered through ethnographic studies conducted over a period of four months with residents living, working, socialising, studying and playing within that community. This work presents an evolving methodology that aims to reframe the lack of agency into exercising change for collective well-being within the community.
Perspectives
I hope this article makes the readers, especially the participatory designers to understand different social contexts and the challenges that arise in those contexts that are key to effective participation in a participatory design exercise. Often as designers, we attempt to create products or in a rush to offer solutions agnostic of contexts. I hope this work helps us rethink about the contexts of our work and makes us think of meaningfully engaging with our participants to yield more effective design directions.
Bishal Goswami
Monash University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Laying the groundwork: Building trust with a marginalised community in Mumbai, India, August 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3661455.3669882.
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