In a recently published peer-reviewed paper, a group of researchers led by UW Human Centered Design & Engineering doctoral student Joseph S. Schafer used a process of design fiction, or creating imaginary, speculative artifacts as a tool for reflection and critique, to explore some of the opportunities and challenges with using participatory design in researching mis- and disinformation and online hate.
The paper, “Participatory design and power in misinformation, disinformation, and online hate research,” was co-authored by HCDE associate professor and Center for an Informed Public co-founder Kate Starbird and HCDE associate professor Daniela K. Rosner and was presented at the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference, held July 10–14 in Pittsburgh.
Participatory design has existed as a research tradition for multiple decades within design and human-computer interaction research. Recently, there has been a push from researchers and from funding agencies to expand the methodological approaches of misinformation and disinformation research to incorporate more community-engaged research methods, such as participatory design. However,the traditional orientations of community-engaged fields like participatory design do not necessarily fit seamlessly into the domains of misinformation, disinformation, and online hate context, so the co-authors set out to speculatively envision what combining these areas would look like.
The co-authors first performed a partial stakeholder analysis to understand some of the groups impacted by misinformation, disinformation, and online hate, and who could be possible communities to engage with. This analysis was then used to create fictional abstracts, adapted from a method introduced by Mark Blythe and Elizabeth Buie for design exploration, as a mechanism for methodological and ethical critique in combining these research areas.
After creating the fictional abstracts, the authors engaged in reflective discussion to identify benefits and risks that each of these hypothetical studies could include, which they then grouped into three sets of value tensions: authenticity (faithfully representing the concerns and needs of communities engaged in participatory design), reciprocity (establishing respectful, mutual relationships with participants in working together in participatory design projects), and impact (using participatory design as a method to enact real-world change).
The co-authors argue that combining these areas of research will be fruitful, but “conclude that PD designers and researchers working in M/D/OH contexts should reflect carefully on the kinds of participation that best suit their specific research questions and context, both involving the positionality of the researchers and participants, as well as the degree to which [participatory design] participants have the capacity to participate.”
Photo above by Chris Amelung via Flickr / CC BY 2.0