Literature Map: The Lineage of Participatory Design — Arnstein → Sanders → Manzini → ISVD's Methodology

The concept of "participation" has been repeatedly reinvented throughout the history of design. The citizen participation debates of the 1960s, workplace democracy movements in 1970s Scandinavia, Scandinavian Participatory Design in the 1980s, co-creation in the 2000s, social innovation in the 2010s — each of these waves carries within it a question about power: who gets to design?

Yet when this lineage is read as a single thread, a structural blind spot emerges. Every one of these approaches assumes that the problem is already known. There are people ready to participate, needs have been identified, communities already exist — participatory design has been built on these premises. But what happens when the problem itself has not yet been recognized? When the people who should participate have not been made visible as "stakeholders"?

This note traces the bibliographic lineage of participatory design from Arnstein to Manzini, and clarifies where ISVD's methodology diverges from this lineage.

Arnstein — Participation as a Question of Power

The lineage of participatory design begins not within design studies but at the intersection of urban planning and political science. Arnstein's (1969) paper "A Ladder of Citizen Participation" classified citizen participation into eight rungs. The lowest rungs — "Manipulation" and "Therapy" — constitute non-participation. The middle rungs — "Informing," "Consultation," and "Placation" — represent tokenism. True participation exists only at the upper rungs: "Partnership," "Delegated Power," and "Citizen Control."

What makes this ladder decisive is its framing of participation not as a technique but as a matter of redistribution of power. Arnstein analyzed the hollowing-out of resident participation in American urban renewal programs, systematically exposing the gap between the form and substance of participation.

Arnstein's ladder continues to be referenced half a century later, but it has an important limitation. The ladder presupposes people who have already been invited to the table. Those who are not present at all — people whose very problems have not been recognized — fall outside its scope. This blind spot would be inherited by the entire lineage of participatory design that followed.

Scandinavian Participatory Design — Starting from Workplace Democracy

From the 1970s through the 1980s, Participatory Design (PD) was established as a distinct methodology in the Scandinavian countries. Its point of departure was not technological innovation but workplace democracy.

The UTOPIA project (1981–1985), led by Pelle Ehn, collaborated with Swedish typographers' unions to ensure that workers themselves could participate in designing the changes that computer introduction would bring to their working environment. Ehn's Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts (1988) theorized this practice, framing participation in the design process not merely as a method but as an exercise of democracy.

Scandinavian PD had three defining characteristics. First, it was grounded in the organizational infrastructure of labor unions. Second, it explicitly problematized power asymmetries between designers and users. Third, it developed concrete methods — prototyping, mockups — that enabled participants without specialized knowledge to engage substantively in the design process.

However, the scope of Scandinavian PD remained fundamentally confined to the "workplace." The participating subjects were clearly identifiable as workers, and the problem (the impact of technology adoption on working conditions) was equally clear. A framework for addressing structural invisibility across society had not yet taken shape at this stage.

Papanek — A Moral Critique of Design

At roughly the same time that Scandinavian PD was emerging from the workplace, Victor Papanek was mounting a fundamental moral critique of the design profession itself. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971) sharply criticized the reality that designers served only affluent consumers while ignoring the needs of the vast majority of the world's population.

Papanek's argument posed two critical questions for the participatory design lineage. First: for whom do we design? Second: what is the ethical responsibility of not designing? Papanek argued that failing to address existing needs was not a passive omission but an active form of exclusion.

Papanek's limitation lay in the weakness of his methodological specificity relative to the power of his critique. His call for "design for the Third World," though well-intentioned, tended to rely on the designer's moral self-awareness rather than foregrounding the agency of the people concerned, as participatory design methodology would later do. Nevertheless, as the first systematic work to institutionally question design's social responsibility, it stands at the headwaters of all subsequent social design research.

Sanders & Stappers — The Spectrum of Co-creation

In the 2000s, Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers organized the historical development of participatory design into three spectra: "design for," "design with," and "design by." Sanders & Stappers (2008), in their paper "Co-creation and the New Landscapes of Design," surveyed the historical trend of design agency shifting from expert to citizen and positioned co-creation as a central concept in design research.

"Design for" is the conventional approach in which designers create for users. "Design with" is the participatory approach in which designers and users collaborate. "Design by" is the approach in which users themselves become the agents of design.

Sanders & Stappers's Convivial Toolbox: Generative Research for the Front End of Design (2012) further developed this theoretical framework, systematizing concrete methods of "generative design research" — collage, mapping, storytelling — aimed at eliciting tacit knowledge and latent needs that conventional interviews and surveys cannot capture.

The contribution of Sanders & Stappers lies in the academic refinement of participatory design. However, their spectrum also assumes that participating subjects have already been identified. In all three modes — "design for / with / by" — the needs that are the object of design must already be recognized in some form. Needs that are not recognized — problems that have been structurally rendered invisible — lie outside this spectrum's reach.

Manzini — Social Innovation in an Age When Everybody Designs

Manzini's Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation (2015) further expanded the scope of participatory design, situating it within the context of social innovation. Manzini's central thesis holds that in an age when not only design professionals but "everybody designs," the role of the design expert shifts from "providing solutions" to "catalyzing and supporting social innovation."

Manzini founded the DESIS Network (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) in 2009, building through an international network of universities in over 50 countries an infrastructure for collecting cases of local social innovation and facilitating mutual learning. His approach extends beyond conventional participatory design in its aspiration to connect bottom-up civic creativity with top-down institutional design.

However, Manzini's framework also has clear limitations. The cases highlighted as social innovation tend to center on "good practices that are already visible" — community gardens, food sharing, co-working spaces. The structural question of why social innovation emerges for certain problems but not for others — that is, the causes of innovation's absence — remains insufficiently addressed.

Transition Design — Extension to the System Level

Irwin, Tonkinwise, and Kossoff (2015) proposed Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon University, extending the scope of participatory design to system-level long-term transformation. Drawing on the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) from Dutch sustainability transition research, they presented a framework for analyzing social change across three layers: niche, regime, and landscape.

Transition Design holds the broadest scope within the participatory design lineage in its ambition to take the transformation of entire socio-technical systems as the object of design. However, its grandeur comes at the cost of concrete intervention methods, as discussed in detail in a separate note.

The Japanese Context — Machizukuri and Community Design

The lineage of participatory design in Japan follows a distinctive path from its Western counterparts. The concept of "machizukuri" (community-building) originated in resident movements of the 1960s and developed as a Japanese form of citizen participation in urban planning. The practice of architects and urban planners working alongside residents to address local challenges emerged independently of Scandinavian PD, rooted in Japan's own social context.

From the 2000s onward, Ryo Yamazaki demonstrated a new development in Japanese participatory design through the practice of "community design." Community Design (2011) presented methods for designers to design not objects but the relational fabric of communities, reinterpreting the machizukuri tradition in contemporary design language. Yamazaki's approach, based at studio-L (founded 2005), has been deployed nationwide and represents one of the practical high points of Japanese participatory design.

Participatory design research at Waseda University is notable as an academic effort to bridge the machizukuri tradition with international PD research. The theorization of participatory design in the Japanese-language sphere has evolved within a sociocultural context distinct from Anglophone research — a decision-making culture that emphasizes consensus-building, communication norms centered on "reading the air" (kuuki wo yomu), and public space design led by government administration.

The Shared Premise Across the Participatory Design Lineage

Surveying the half-century lineage from Arnstein to Transition Design, one fundamental premise surfaces. Every approach implicitly takes as its starting point the assumption that the problem has already been recognized.

This premise is not illegitimate in itself. Indeed, as a methodology for organizing participation around known problems and restructuring power relations, the participatory design lineage has been remarkably effective. The issue is that this premise leaves a methodological void in domains where the problem itself has been structurally rendered invisible.

ISVD's Methodological Point of Divergence

ISVD's Social Design for Public Imagination learns much from the participatory design lineage but diverges at one decisive point: its starting point is not "known needs" but "invisible problems."

This divergence stems from the fact that ISVD's methodology incorporates the insights of agnotology. The field systematized by Robert N. Proctor asks "why certain important facts remain unknown." Social Design for Public Imagination structurally analyzes "what has been made invisible" and "why it is invisible" before organizing participation.

Specifically, the methodology proceeds through three stages:

1. Identifying structural invisibility: Analyzing the margins of statistical data, institutional blind spots, and exclusions from the policy process to identify "unseen problems"
2. Elucidating the mechanisms of invisibility: Clarifying whether information asymmetry, epistemic injustice, or strategic ignorance is at work — and why the problem remains invisible
3. Visualization and action connection: Designing information infrastructure to make invisible structures visible and connect that visibility to civic and policy action

These three stages constitute what might be called a "design before" phase, preceding the "design for / with / by" spectrum of participatory design. Only once a problem has been made visible does it become possible to organize participation.

ISVD Within the Lineage — Critical Inheritance

ISVD's methodology does not reject the participatory design lineage. Rather, it critically inherits from it.

From Arnstein, it inherits the perspective that frames participation as a matter of power. From Papanek, it inherits the stance of institutionally questioning design's social responsibility. From Scandinavian PD, it learns the importance of methods that guarantee substantive involvement of the people concerned. From Sanders & Stappers, it incorporates generative research techniques for accessing tacit knowledge. From Manzini, it shares the perspective of designing ecosystems for social innovation.

Yet prior to all of these, ISVD poses the question: why is this problem invisible? Without this question, participation closes itself within the circle of "those who already have a voice." To bring into the space of participation those whose voices have been structurally stripped — the subjects of epistemic injustice — requires first making visible the problems they face.

In this sense, Social Design for Public Imagination complements the participatory design lineage. By making invisible structures visible, it extends the reach of participatory design from "known problems" to "problems that have been structurally rendered invisible."

→ Related: Social Design Foundations Lab Overview | Social Design vs Service Design vs Transition Design | From Agnotology to 'Structural Invisibility'