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Participatory approaches play an important role in humanitarian engineering projects. Involving people in engineering design processes, help break down power imbalances [1][2] and facilitates user empowerment and ownership over the designed outcome [3][4]. This is important in all engineering projects, but particularly in humanitarian engineering projects, which tend to serve vulnerable or marginalised people and communities.
While participatory design, a field of research and practice, offers a range of tools for humanitarian engineers, recent studies have found that there are numerous challenges associated with this. Hussain et al. have, for example, found that participatory design, which emerged in Scandinavia, might not work as well in societies, i.e. Cambodia, where stronger social hierarchy and varying education and income levels can influence the process significantly [5]. Rosenqvist has reached a similar conclusion and argues that while Scandinavian culture allows for dispute and disagreement, which feeds participatory design, other cultures are more focused on reaching unanimous consensus while maintaining social harmony [6][7]
More research is needed to explore the complex relationship between participation and cultural contexts to help determine whether and how participatory approaches can be adapted to provide better outcomes in humanitarian engineering projects.
References
[1] Robertson, T. and Simonsen, J., 2012. Participatory Design: an introduction. In Routledge international handbook of participatory design (pp. 21-38). Routledge.
[2] Bratteteig, T. and Wagner, I., 2012, August. Disentangling power and decision-making in participatory design. In Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers-Volume 1 (pp. 41-50). ACM.
[3] Juarez, J.A. and Brown, K.D., 2008. Extracting or empowering? A critique of participatory methods for marginalized populations. Landscape Journal, 27(2), pp.190-204.
[4] Hussain, S., Sanders, E.B.N. and Steinert, M., 2012. Participatory design with marginalized people in developing countries: Challenges and opportunities experienced in a field study in Cambodia. International Journal of Design, 6(2).
[5] Hussain, S. 2011. “Designing for and with Marginalized People in Developing Countries: Efforts to Undertake a Participatory Design Project with Children Using Prosthetic Legs in Cambodia.” PhD in Engineering Design and Materials, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
[6] Rosenqvist, T., 2018, "Experiencing everyday sanitation governance: a critical inquiry into the governance of community-managed sanitation services in Indonesia and whether it could be otherwise". Doctoral dissertation. Institute for Sustainable Futures, Technical University of Sydney.
[7] Rosenqvist, T., 2020, From ‘Thinging’to ‘Musyawarahing’ and beyond: Adapting PD to diverse cultural contexts and democratic ideals. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020-Participation (s) Otherwise-Volume 2 (pp. 159-163).
Supervisors
Dr Tanja Rosenqvist
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Find information more the application process here.
Want to learn more?
For specific questions about the project and funding opportunities, please contact:
Tanja Rosenqvist - tanja.rosenqvist@rmit.edu.au