TEMPORAL SCALES OF PARTICIPATION: A RIFT BETWEEN ACTORS AND SPECTATORS

Abstract

Participatory design is a future-oriented discipline, but there is an imbalance in agency between those who produce future imaginations, and those who consume them. This paper argues that we, as designers and producers of future-oriented design interventions, hold responsibilities towards third party “spectators”. The paper departs from an incident that took place two years after a Future Workshop had taken place between public sector workers and citizens in Malmö, Sweden, when a concerned third party mistook the workshop’s potential and preferred imaginations of the future for truths. In the light of Hannah Arendt’s writings on imagination the paper separates actors from spectators, marking a difference in agency but also a difference in temporality. For the actors’ imagination is directed towards the future, while it for the spectators is directed towards the past, or present at best.