Apologies for cross posting
Book Launch Fri 3rd Oct 12 CET: Design Participation. Palgrave MacMillan 2025 by prof. Sampsa Hyysalo https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-95437-5 (Open Access)
The zoom link to the launch event: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/68882981567. Physical event Aalto University, Väre Building, class G 203 13-14 Helsinki time (EET) 12-13 Central European Time (CST) 11-12 UK time (GMT)
To walk the talk of the transformative potential of design, today’s designers, planners and innovators must seriously pursue design that contributes to positive environmental and social change. But how to go about pursuing it? Design participation presents doable and demonstrated ways by which design can become a major contributor to social and environmental change. This entails a shift from seeking to define solutions to opening spaces in which others—activists, entrepreneurs, civil servants, neighborhood communities, politicians—can effectively elaborate on and find (re)solutions to the issues they are facing. Indeed, the last decades have seen an ever-widening public participation in transformative projects by industry and public administrations alike, across the globe. It is now time to pursue design participation for real: in earnest, skillfully and for real problems. This is central message of the book: participation matters – but only if we duly attend the matters of participation in pursuing it. In the book launch we examine seven ways to expand our understanding of participation in design: From design solutions to design participation; From participatory design to design participation; From professional designers to those who engage people; From participatory ideals to design participation work; From concept design workshops to active use and design-in-use; From invited participation to invested participation, and; From designable change to catalyzing actions into motion to achieve sociotechnical change. The 30 mins overview presentation is followed by dialogue with book contributors Prof Cindy Kohtala (Umeå) prof Andrea Botero (Aalto) in response to audience questions posed by researchers and practitioners.
Sampsa Hyysalo is professor of CoDesign in Aalto University, Finland. His interdisciplinary research focuses on designer-user relations in sociotechnical change, and bridges design participation, science & technology studies, and innovation studies. This has meant empirical and theoretical research on how change happens in technoscientific contexts and how new technologies shape, and shaped by, everyday life and everyday work. His interest in designer – user relations has meant investigating how the use and design can be arranged alternatively and to what effects. This has over the years lead to over 100 peer review articles and eight books through his engagements in participatory design, codesign, open and user innovation, living labs, open design, maker spaces, peer knowledge creation, user communities and citizen science. https://www.aalto.fi/en/people/sampsa-hyysalo