Rūta Šerpytytė, Uttishta Sreerama Varanasi, and Thomas Olsson. 2026. Scaling Care-fully: Uncovering Labours of Care When Scaling Participatory Design in the Public Sector. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 262, 1–19.
Abstract
Participatory design (PD) is readily applied in HCI to address complex sociotechnical challenges. However, PD faces ethical and practical concerns when it comes to scaling, i.e., extending its depth, scope or span. We extend the current understandings of scaling PD by applying feminist care ethics through Joan Tronto’s framework of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and solidarity. Pursuing care when scaling participatory activities simultaneously requires acknowledging various backstage processes and the affective labour that typically remains invisible. Drawing from our experiences of diverse PD endeavours with migrant communities and a Finnish municipality, we use reflexive discussions to recognise 13 labours encountered while scaling our PD approaches with care in mind. We discuss how these introduce new costs and challenges and elaborate on their salience in PD work. Finally, we provide strategies for care-full scaling, which we define as primarily an affective, but also political process that requires continuous reflexivity.