By Rūta Šerpytytė and Uttishta Varanasi
Participatory Design (PD) has been one of the main pillars in Trust-M since the start of the project, as a means of engaging and empowering migrant communities. the implementation of PD as a research approach within a multidisciplinary team comes with it’s challenges, as well as navigating the diverse methods, values, and expectations that come with it.
Traditionally, PD has been framed as a way to democratise decision-making, empower participants, and give voice to marginalised communities. Yet in practice, we’ve often seen it co-opted or misused in ways that actually reinforce existing inequalities: social, economic, and technological.
To make sense of these tensions, we looked closely at seven Living Labs across Europe, spaces where participatory design is built to thrive. Our aim was to see how these labs could act as infrastructures for agency and capacity building, and where they fell short. Instead of writing a standard, more academic report, we chose to reflect on these findings through interactive storytelling.
The result is a digital click-through story made with Twine, an open-source platform for building interactive stories. The reader receives an invitation to attend a funeral service of “Particia Pation”, a character embodying Participatory Design. As they move through the story, they encounter different mourners who share memories, values, and frustrations about PD.
The story also opens space for reflection on the future; what might participatory work look like if it could overcome these obstacles? With its combination of illustrations, audio, and “choose your own adventure” moments, the piece invites to engage both critically and imaginatively with the past, present, and potential futures of PD.
You can also play the game on Itch platform.
The piece was presented as a demo in the sixth decennial Aarhus conference ”Computing (X) Crisis”, which aims to continue to set new agendas for critical action, theory, and practice in computing.
The demo at the conference was well-received with participatory design experts and non-experts engaging and reflecting with the themes presented in the story. A personal highlight was having Pelle Ehn, a prominent academic from the Participatory Design community and one of the key members behind the Malmö Living Lab, engaging in the story and reflecting on the fact that there yet exists hope for Participatory Design in the face of contemporary challenges.
(Image credits: Viktoria Horn)
Uttishta Sreerama Varanasi and Rūta Šerpytytė. 2025. The Death of Participatory Design: A Critical Reflection on Living Labs through Interactive Storytelling. In Adjunct Proceedings of the Sixth Decennial Aarhus Conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR Adjunct ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 5, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1145/3737609.3747103