Participatory design has become the default aspiration for socially engaged research. The premise is simple: rather than designing for communities, we design with them. Rather than extracting knowledge, we co-produce it. Rather than speaking on behalf of others, we create the conditions for people to speak for themselves. In principle, the logic is sound. In practice, the power dynamics are far more stubborn than the methodology acknowledges.
The question is not whether participatory design is better than top-down research — it obviously is. The question is whether it is good enough. Whether the frameworks we use genuinely redistribute authorship and benefit, or whether they simply make extraction feel more democratic.
The Problem of Entry
Every participatory process begins with a researcher entering a community. This entry is never neutral. The researcher arrives with institutional backing, funding, publication targets, and career incentives. They arrive with a set of questions already partially formed, with ethical clearance already granted by an institution the community had no role in shaping. They arrive, in short, with power — and no amount of participatory language can erase that asymmetry.
This is not a moral failing. It is a structural condition. The academy rewards individual authorship, conference presentations, and high-impact publications. Community members who contribute their knowledge, their time, and their trust rarely appear in the acknowledgements, let alone on the title page. The researcher leaves with a career asset; the community is left with, at best, a report they did not write in a language they may not read.
Historical Lessons: The Community Arts Project
South Africa offers one of the most instructive historical examples of what genuine collaboration looks like — and what it costs. The Community Arts Project (CAP), founded in Cape Town in 1977, operated for over three decades as a space where creative production was genuinely community-driven. CAP did not impose external agendas. It provided resources, space, and mentorship, and allowed communities to determine the form and content of their own creative work.
What made CAP distinctive was its commitment to process over output. The institution measured its success not by the artworks produced but by the relationships built, the skills transferred, and the sense of collective ownership that participants developed. When CAP finally closed in 2008 after thirty-one years of operation, it left behind not a collection of objects but a network of practitioners who had learned to create on their own terms.
“Participatory design that does not change the conditions of participation is performance. It makes the researcher feel better without making the community more powerful.”
Ubuntu and the Decolonisation of Method
Mekoa (2023) argues that decolonising participatory research requires more than reforming Western methods — it requires grounding research practice in fundamentally different ontological frameworks. Ubuntu, understood not as a slogan but as a relational ontology, offers one such framework. If knowledge is inherently collective, then the very concept of intellectual property — which assumes individual ownership of ideas — is a category error when applied to community-based research.
This is not an abstract philosophical point. It has immediate practical implications. When a researcher enters a community and leaves with insights that become a published paper, a conference presentation, or a funded grant application, the standard academic framework treats those outputs as belonging to the researcher. An Ubuntu-informed framework would recognise them as belonging to the relationship — and would demand structures that reflect that shared ownership.
Design Education and Power
The Hasso Plattner d-school Afrika at the University of Cape Town represents one attempt to embed participatory principles into design education. The d-school Afrika draws on design thinking methodology while engaging directly with South African communities, training students to work collaboratively rather than prescriptively. Yet even here, the institutional context shapes outcomes: students receive degrees, build portfolios, and advance careers. The communities they work with receive projects of varying quality and longevity.
This is not a criticism of the d-school Afrika specifically — it is a structural observation about all design education that operates within the conventional university model. The question is whether participatory design can ever fully overcome the extractive logic of the institutions that house it, or whether genuine redistribution requires institutional forms that do not yet exist.
Toward Genuine Redistribution
If participatory design is to avoid becoming a more sophisticated form of extraction, several conditions must be met. First, communities must have veto power — not just input, but the authority to halt, redirect, or cancel a project at any stage. Second, outputs must be co-owned, with legal frameworks that recognise collective intellectual property. Third, the benefits of research — funding, publications, career advancement — must be shared in ways that are tangible and lasting, not tokenistic.
None of this is easy. All of it is necessary. The alternative is a discipline that talks about collaboration while practising extraction — and that, ultimately, is worse than honest top-down research, because it adds dishonesty to the injury.
References
Costandius, E. and Bitzer, E. (2015) Engaging Higher Education Curricula: A Critical Citizenship Perspective. Stellenbosch: Sun Press.
Mekoa, I. (2023) ‘Decolonising Participatory Research: Ubuntu as Methodology for Community-Based Knowledge Production’, South African Journal of Higher Education, 37(2), pp. 45–62.
Simbao, R. (2016) ‘The Community Arts Project (CAP): A Political and Social History’, Social Dynamics, 42(1), pp. 116–134.
Sobeck, J. and Agius, E. (2007) ‘Organizational Capacity Building: Addressing a Research and Practice Gap’, Evaluation and Program Planning, 30(3), pp. 237–246.