Who, how and where people are invited to discuss (and influence) technological design rests ultimately on varying and competing assumptions about value and values. These assumed values, always-loosely justified leaps to what is valued, prompt various leaps to processes and procedures that will achieve these values, and to human participation. In any case, these values and procedural means also make always-incomplete reference to other ends when asked “why”, through necessarily-thinner elaborations and justifications. In all case, they are both the product of and produce the various semi-material realities of the changing technologies themselves. {need to elaborate – but I think there is a matrix of possibilities here}

We consider these necessarily loose connections across the values of human participation in technological design, in order to consider a range of nascent possibilities toward the future. We consider these connections across changes to underlying nature of information technologies over time {list them out?}. This forging of new rationales for particular approaches to human participation in technological design also raises the more general argument for a future of the future for participation in technological design.

We begin with 2 broad approaches to the rationale of participation: participation as of value, and participation as a value.

Broadly speaking, “participation as of value” considers participation in technological design as a means to desired ends - e.g. efficient product-service delivery; product-service customization for customers; and harm reduction, to name a few. The desirability of these ends are necessarily associated with other ends to justify their pursuit, for example: efficiency in order to compete with other organizations in order to avoid organizational decline and death; product-service customization as a different means to the same competitive ends through differentiation (not cost); and the reduction of harm in order to steer within legal constraints and to avoid legal sanctions. In every case, the desirability of an end depends on a number of leaps across a set of “why” answers to justify their pursuit.

In term of the “how” to achieve these ends through technological design, a number of possible and never-purely derived methods and means are possible. Within those means, a number of possible rationales and methods for human participation are also possible, but not always. These possibilities revolve around how answers to the who, what, where, when and why of participation are justified in supporting its value to the desired ends.

For example, if improved organizational efficiency is the goal, there is a possible leap to assumptions that technology and business-process experts should in-charge of selecting and implementing new technologies into the organization. Employees would participate in order to learn how to use and adapt these technologies to achieve these organizational-efficient ends.

Very different means to organizational efficiency have also been proposed and evaluated; for example, socio-technical design and the efficiency produced by letting to coal miners figure out the most efficient practices and technologies. Similar conjectures were considered during the so-called end user computing movement in the 1980s, which radiates through in revised form in today's user-lead technology selection and use of software apps.

In both cases, the ultimate values and ends of the project often drive the identification of the processes and means to achieve them. For example, the use of technology for organizational efficiency can prompt efficient design processes; for example, the use of technology experts to select “best of breed software; the “involvement” of people early in design to introduce the project and to get “buy-in”; the selection of representatives from identified groups to simplify deliberation; the categorization of individuals into stakeholder groups with more-or-less well defined interests; a focus on early design and requirements “sign-off”; and the identification of users and desirable use (and “resistance” if some oppose this use). Once infected with the end for design, that end can typically drive the procedures to achieve them.

In contrast, a company involved in the generation of new and novel electronic games could imply something very different in terms of technological design and participation: e.g. the offering of numerous generic software applications which users select and customize toward their individual, group and collective needs. In this case, a marketplace of numerous app providers with competing products serves as a potentially endless source of supply and demand. Whether this is an entirely new context for human participation in design, or whether it is an augment that sits on top of the efficiency ends earlier (e.g. the need for github and other software design systems to manage coding teams), it remains as an alternative means-end configuration fostering different forms of participation in design.

In any of these “participation as of value” cases, despite the broad range of ends and processes, people's participation in design is towards the production of value.

In contrast, and still depending on a loose but different set of connections across other means, is participation “as a value”. Participation as a value is not a means to achieving external ends, but is an end in itself. It is itself “good”. In whatever form participation takes, even through representatives, people's influence on the shaping and deployment of technology is good for its own sake, irrespective of the outcome.

To be clear, there are possible cross-overs into the “participation as of value”. But hypothetically, participation as a value can and perhaps must be considered on its own terms, since any other results from it are not the primary thing of value.

There are other possible higher ends loosely answering the “why” for participation “for its own sake”: e.g. individual rights to shape the technologies that they use and are affected by; the joy of humans shaping their own tools and work environment; seeing each and every person as offering a unique and important vantage point from individual experiences; seeking those diverse perspectives on work and individual experiences for technological design and use (but as a secondary end); the striving for limited or zero harm to people's quality-of-working life. {some of these are still ends driven, and so will need further work}.

Broader values about participation may also argue that all technological and organizational design should be driven by all humans interests, and not by other non-human things, such as markets, technology for technology sake, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, shareholders (a subset of human interests), and other goals.

Participation as a value can also provide a critique of the assumed relationships across means and ends in participation as of value, for example a restricted set of external interests absent from the organization (e.g. shareholder value, and consumers); the real possibility of shrinking consumer demand if work is lost to automation; or the loss of the natural environment making life unlivable.

and values fall around assumed goals and goods for particula

We conclude that