1. Is participatory design still possible in a meaningful way in this age of large IT firms, AI, and packages?

• This question is the result of a problem with overall distanciation in the design, implementation and use of technology, divorced from the contexts of production and use.
• Evident in Feenberg and his (now) drawing upon Foucault and Latour is the codification of practices in technosystems by remote and absent specialists in very-different contexts, which is then brought to and implemented in new contexts.
• These technologies are often presented as universal rationalities and fait d’acommplis (i.e. take it or leave it), but depends on the span of the technology (e.g. enterprise systems cast the organizations mechanistically, while personalized apps cast people as artisans).
• If you consider that many organization-wide technologies are driven by the goals of labour displacement, typically argued as necessary for “organizational survival” through efficiency and profitability, then participation in any form is severely curtailed as unnecessary.
  • Typically, the customer, who benefits or not from the technology, is often absent from these conversations, despite having to deal with for example, how frustratingly limited technology-automated agents are in answering their questions.
• In any and all cases, technosystems design and effects are shaped and infused by the social and political contexts around them.
  • Acknowledging that technologies also have semi-independent realities independent of those contexts (i.e. Latour).
• And so they can produce very different outcomes under different social and practical contexts, as so they are is ambiguous as per Feenberg and social construction suggest.
• Feenberg and Arendt argue that any and all “experiences” from diverse participants using or affected by technology are important for participation (taking part and part-taking)…
  • This won’t happen in a boardroom around a table, talking conceptually about a technology that isn’t yet built or implemented
• It is only later on, when it is allowed by certain methodologies of design, and certainly too late to matter after the technology is cement, that the important experiences for participation are ignored.
• The response will be simply that the truncation of participation to only those legitimized and restricted experiences, and early in design, truncated by simple and shallow language, such as “efficiency” and “effectiveness”, are closed designs, or designs
  • Perhaps it is only when more generic technology is put in front of users to play with for individual use that the problems of distanciation and the imposition of technology on work is reduced – although their may be other secondary uses that fall into the restricted cases; e.g. the use of the same systems to monitor and sanction work.
• Given there are very few experiences with technology in earlier design phases, perhaps the experiences people can speak to are with the good, bad and ugly of current technologies, work, and the effects
  • These experiences can include managers and other senior executives and their distant experiences with profitability and other grander outcomes….

2. Is PD still even useful and important or is technology so powerful and configurable that we all can make technology do what we want? 3. Is PD more important for some contexts (eg organizational IS) vs personal IS or is it it important everywhere but in different ways? 4. How do philosophical views of design and technosystem help us to sort this out? 5. What are some of the underlying tensions and conflicts that are not yet solved? 6. Is consensus possible? How do we pay attention to the others, and to what degree? 7. What are the rights and duties of participants in design?

What are the key concepts we want to draw out and rely on? 1. Technosystem 2. Determinant judgments 3. Distributed justice 4. Reflective judgments

Pragmatic vs idealistic