Panel, inclusivity in PD

Thursday 23nd of August
16:00 – 17:00
Hasselt University, in the Old Prison

“Inclusivity in Participatory Design starts with our Conference – or Does it? Towards a plural, inclusive, diverse and intersectional conference”

One aim of the Participatory Design Conference is to be as inclusive as possible, and to increase the diversity of voices (from different parts of the world, or with new perspectives on participation) that build our field. Different strategies have been tried out to pursue this vision, such as the practitioners/industry track, exhibition track, community challenges, the David Hakken scholarship etc. Given that diversity and inclusion can still be handled better and improved, in this panel we will discuss how we can continue to work on these issues in the future. This is an issue raising panel, and the place where some planning for the future can happen.

We welcome everyone to discuss these issues and take some steps towards this goal. We will have a panel of people making short statements to provoke reflection, followed by discussion and joint formulation of proposals. Our starting points for discussion are:

  • The current conference deliberately sought contributions from outside the PD community for the short papers, but reviewers found lack of PD literature, etc a reason to reject. Is PD(C) too orthodox?
  • PDC is developing a culture consistent with ACM-compliance. This promotes a science model of reporting and a US American scholarship base-line. Is that the only possible model?
  • Procedures for inviting / reviewing / discussing and selecting need to be attuned to the possibility of exclusion. This year a lot of “diversity” – in terms of themes and geographical coverage – was marked low by reviewers. Why were these papers at the bottom?
  • How can we produce a review process that is helpful for all and still likely to include a more varied set of papers? Or should there be other tracks and ways into the conference which support people from contexts where global (North) academic priorities are not valued/taught/accessible?
  • Is it worth it and would it add value to the participatory nature of the conference to arrange for live translation at future PDC venues? Should we add more submission forms (e.g. video, podcasts etc.)? Rethink language policies?
  • Can we creatively devise a funding mechanism for newcomers/for people coming from underrepresented areas to attend ? (e.g. 1% of the conference fees go to a pot of money for such funding options? Can we have other differentiated fee, like there is for students?)

Organizers (the PDC Diversity taskforce): Linda Tonolli (University of Trento), Giacomo Poderi (IT University of Copenhagen), Vasilis Vlachokyriakos (OpenLab Athens), Raechel Luck (Open University), Ann Light (University of Sussex) and Andrea Botero (Oulu university)