Goñi, I. (2025)
Every year, more guidelines and handbooks are published, instructing us on how we ought to design public participation. But designing participation isn’t a harmonious exercise; principles are in tension. It’s full of design friction, and that’s a good thing... This paper argues that political embeddedness and technical standardization are not complementary ideals, and also, they are not incompatible. It requires workers to sort through multiple demands, and perhaps that is why all participation events I have seen always have something 'odd' about them, some design quirks...
Embedding public participation in political systems and standardizing participation practices are often seen as complementary ‘best practices.’ Generally, design principles are presented as complementary partners. This article challenges that assumption drawing from STS and Democratic Theory. Embedding aligns participation with formal politics, requiring ‘messy’ negotiation with political actors and institutions. Standardization, by contrast, aligns with expert frameworks, prioritizing ‘sameness.’ To explore this tension, I contrast two cases: Chile’s Ministry of Science, which embeds participation through legal mandates, and the UK’s Sciencewise program, which standardizes it via expert-led standards. Drawing on serial interviews, observations and document analysis, I show how these design principles shape practitioners’ work, political influence and the quirks of their designs. This article challenges the view of participatory design as seamless technical undertakings, highlighting the conflicting pressures practitioners face. Through this lens, I showcase the hybridity of design and how design work actively co-produces technocratic, liberal, and emancipatory visions of democracy-in-the-making.