This is a presentation used in Cumulus Hong Kong 2016 open design for e-very-thing.

1. Participatory Design
Fieldwork:
Dealing with Emotions
Mariana Salgado
Michail Galanakis
Esa Pursiainen
SUO&CO
Independent researchers & practitioners
21.11.2016
Cumulus, Hong Kong

2. Emotional investment while
engaging with vulnerable
people – as many
immigrants are – in design
fieldwork should be an
element of analysis.
Processes with emotional
impact influence fieldwork.

3. An emotion is a strong feeling coming from certain
circumstances, moods or relationships with others and
which is intuitive.

4. How to deal with emotions in participatory
design research?

5. Case Study
1

6. MIGRATION STORIES FROM EAST HELSINKI: OUR CITY
A series of workshops and other events in which different immigrant
communities were explicitly invited to take part in the design process.

7. Participants in the workshop: 15 women who knew each other well.
Food! an integral part of the workshop’s planning and realization.

9. Using props (cards) made the
life stories of our participants
easier to narrate/express/write/
visualize.

10. “In my home country, I had to escape from the police. In
Finland, you are not free even though you are not in prison.
When I came here I got a new life and I smiled at everyone.
But Finnish people keep their distance and so I do not feel
free. Real freedom for me is in Kurdistan. Freedom is in the
mind and in the feelings.”
”I do not think myself in Meri-Rastila, in the future I will
go back to Kurdistan, I am counting the days.”

11. The identification of the need for
services in the area such as
appropriate language courses for
mothers and recreational spaces
in which immigrants could get to
know Finnish people.
In the Alternative Master Plan
which was the main design
product of the OURcity project, our
findings were translated into a
larger communal space for
immigrants and Finns to gather,
as well as a number of public
spaces planned to be used by the
diverse community in the area

12. Engagement Emotions
Reciprocity
2

13. Strong emotions were triggered due to several factors: the visualisations, the
relationships amongst participants, the overall atmosphere, the open-ended nature
of the questions, and the content of the discussion, namely migration stories.

14. It is ethically questionable to
incite memories of painful
events.
As design researchers we have
multiple roles: confidants,
translators, facilitators, and
investigators.
In these roles we oscillated within
a wide range of emotions varying
from sadness when our
participants got sad, to joyful
when our participants were
happy.
We felt empathy and we were also
quite conscious of our roles and
research questions, and tried to
keep our emotions at bay.

15. Emotions, even when they are
controversial, are unavoidable.
Light and Akama (2012) argue
that participatory methods
cannot be seen in isolation from
the people engaged in them.
They are “[m]ethods and
techniques [that] require
embodiment”.
This embodiment could be
painful in research situations in
which traumatic events are
discussed.
Light, A., & Akama, Y. (2012). The Human Touch: Participatory practice and the role of facilitation in designing with communities. Proc. Participatory
Design Conference, Roskilde,Denmark, p. 61-70.

16. When emotions run high
3

17. Time and space for reflection
Defusing

18. Debriefing and defusing

19. Relational expertise

20. Conclusions
3

21. Spent some more time
talking with us or
personnel trained for
debriefing, immediately
after the workshop
Picture in Flickr by Stephen published under CC license.

22. Reserve time to make a
debriefing session with
our colleagues just after
the session
Picture in Flickr by Stephen published under CC license.

23. Be empathic with
participants’ emotions
but also know how not to
aggravate their
emotions
Picture in Flickr by Stephen published under CC license.

24. Offer our mediation in
order for our participants
to get help from, for
instance, community
workers and trauma
specialists, in dealing with
certain very distressing
events in their lives.
Picture in Flickr by Stephen published under CC license.

25. When our research falls into the category of
designing with the Other, recognizing design as a
social practice requires dealing with emotions.

26. References
[1] Clarke, R., & Wright, P. (2012). Evocative of Experience: Crafting cross-cultural digital narratives through stories
and portraits. NordCHI’12, Copenhagen, Denmark.
[2] Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., & Hillgren, P-A. (2012). Agonistic participatory design: working with marginalized
movements. Co-Design: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts. 8: 2-3, p.127-144.
[3] Keshavarz, M., & Mazé, R. (2013) 'Design and Dissensus: Framing and Staging Participation in Design
Research', Design Philosophy Papers, 1: unpaginated.
[4] Manzini, E. (2015). Design, When Everybody Design. An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. Rachel
Coad (Trans.). MIT Press: Cambridge MA, London.
[5] Salgado, M. and Galanakis, M. (2014). “So What?” Limitations of Participatory Design on Decision-making in
Urban Planning. PDC '14: Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design
Conference: Short Papers, Industry Cases, Workshop Descriptions, Doctoral Consortium papers, and Keynote
abstracts, 2, 5-8. doi>10.1145/2662155.2662177
[6] Lammers, E. (2005). Refugees, asylum seekers and anthropologists: the taboo on giving. Global Migration
Perspectives. Global Commission on International Migration. Switzerland.
[7] Norman, D. A. (2008). Emotional Design. Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things? Basic Books, New York.
[8] Oatley, K. & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2011). Basic Emotions in Social Relationships, Reasoning and Psychological
Illnesses. Emotion Review, 3: 4, p.424-433.
[9] van Dugteren, J. R. (2014). The dynamics of Empathy within Participatory Design Pedagogy and Practice. Master
thesis. University of Cape Town.
[10] Izard, C. E. (2010). The Many Meanings/Aspects of Emotion: Definitions, Functions, Activation, and Regulation.
Emotion Review, 2: 4, p.363–370.
[11] Concise Oxford Dictionary. (2001). Tenth Edition. Judy Pearsall (Ed.). Suffolk, UK: Oxford University Press.
[12] Meidän-Ourcity. (2012). [Accessed 07 April, 2016] https://meidankaupunki.wordpress.com/alternative-master-
plan/

27. [13] Denborough, D. (2008). Collective narrative practice: Responding to individuals, groups and communities
who have experienced trauma. Adelaide, Australia: Dulwich Centre Publications.
[14] Leikkilä, J., Faehnle, M. and Galanakis, M. (2013). Urban Nature and Social Diversity Promoting
Interculturalism in Helsinki by Planning Urban Nature, Urban Forestry & Urban
Greening, 12(2), 183-190.
[15] McDonald, S. (2003). Answering questions and asking more: reflections on feminist participatory research.
Resources for Feminist Research, 30 (1/2): p.77-100.
[16] Light, A., & Akama, Y. (2012). The Human Touch: Participatory practice and the role of facilitation in designing
with communities. Proc. Participatory Design Conference, Roskilde,
Denmark, p. 61-70.
[17] Dyregrov, A. (1997). The Process in Psychological Debriefings. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 10: 4, p.589–605.
[18] Magyar, J. & Theane, T. (2010). Debriefing critical incidents in the emergency department. Emergency
Medicine Australia, 22:6, p. 499–506.
[19] Dindler, C., & Iversen, O.S. (2014). Relational Expertise in Participatory Design. Proc. Participatory Design
Conference, Windhoek, Namibia, p. 41-50.
[20] Hynes, T. (2003). The issue of “trust” and “mistrust” in research with refugees: choices, caveats and
considerations for researchers. New issues on refugee research. The UN refugee
agency, UK. Retrieved from http://www.unhcr.org/3fcb5cee1.html
[21] Crossley, L. (2003). Building Emotions in Design. The Design Journal, 6:3, p.35-45.
[22] Galanakis, M. and Oikarinen-Jabai, H. (2007). Embodied Diversity: Let Me Show You My Shadow. International
Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations , 5(7),
63-68.
[23] Brand, E., Binder, T., & Sanders, E.B.-N. (2013). Tools and techniques. Ways to engage telling, making and
enacting. Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design. Simonsen, J. and Robertson, T. (eds).
Routledge, New York, USA.
[24] Kalantidou, E., & Fry, T. (2014). Design in the Borderlines. Routledge. UK.
[25] Cipolla, C., & Bartholo, R. (2014). A Dialogical Approach to Socially Responsible Design. International Journal
of Design, 8(2), 87-100.

28. Thank you!
mariana.salgado@aalto.fi
http://www.slideshare.net/mariana.salgado
Pictures in this presentation are part of the two projects presented here.

29. Twitter: @salgado
Blog:
http://pinatasdigitales.wordpress.com/
Slideshare:
http://www.slideshare.net/marianasalgado