Project Engagement Technologies and Their Role in Shaping Conditions for Engagement and Care in Participatory Design Projects

As the development of new digital technologies is increasingly mobilised as a solution to global crises, such as in healthcare and the climate crisis, design is becoming an ever more influential actor in the legislation of answers to questions of ‘how to care’. This chapter explores the relationship between participatory design (PD) activities and care. We enquire empirically into how engagement and care are done in design practice by looking retrospectively at a PD project on welfare innovation for senior citizens in Denmark through the analytical lens of care. We draw on conceptions of care in the intersection of feminist research, science and technology studies (STS), and PD scholarships. Based on this, we develop the notion of ‘project engagement technologies’ (PET) as an analytical concept, which brings into view the role of material and technical entities that, despite their triviality, enable specific forms of engagement and care in design projects, and exclude others. We propose a view on attempts at doing ‘careful engagements’ as crafted activities and suggest PET as an empirical-ethnographic resource to critically examine conditions for engagement and care in projects and assemblages that aim to do ‘careful engagement’. We argue that since design and care are already deeply entangled in practice, and sometimes in problematic and uncareful ways, exploring relations between care and design may be an interesting topic for STS, opening new possibilities for intervention and fostering engagement and care through design.