Contemporary Participatory Design: Research Agendas for Societal Crisis

This article addresses urgent calls for action and advocates for equitable, responsible and participatory research and practices that, while engaging with contemporary societal landscapes, and global polycrises, directly contribute to the collaborative shaping of alternative futures and real-world impact. Over the past decade, Participatory Design (PD) research, theory, and practice - along with its core values of participation, empowerment, and democracy - have diversified and evolved in novel directions. Drawing on surveys of contemporary engagements with global and societal challenges, this article discusses how PD engages with three interrelated crises: technological, onto-epistemological, and socio-ecological. Based on this work, we foreground four emerging research agendas in contemporary PD - politicising, diversifying, relationality, and transforming, and show how they extend PD's theory, method and practice towards societal impact and change. Drawing together such research agendas across diverse disciplines, continents and practices, we demonstrate how contemporary PD can be leveraged to address today's acute crises.