Five Enunciations of Empowerment in Participatory Design

Participatory design has been defined as having 'user's democratic participation and empowerment at its core' (Correia and Yusop, 2008). The PD discourse has a strong moral and rhetorical claim by its emphasis on users' empowerment. This paper is a result of a student project, guided by a curiosity about how empowerment is enunciated in the PD field today. In a literature-review of academic papers from the proceedings of PDC 2008 we found that empowerment is enunciated in five different ways which can be translated into 5 categories: 1) Specific user groups 2) Direct democracy 3) The users' position 4) Researchers' practice 5) Reflexive practice. These categories exist conjointly in the literature and suggest that empowerment is not just a moral and politically correct design goal, but a challenged and complex activity.