The work of Pirjo Näkki at VTT, Finland, is closely related to what we do on social media and user feedback in design and innovation processes at SINTEF. She is by the way coming to a seminar arranged by a sister-project of RECORD – Networked Power (http://bit.ly/9wK9Dj) – program in Norwegian (sorry).

BTW: For a look at how we use social media for user feedback in the record project, you may take a look at the following website, where we invited interaction designers to provide feedback on interaction design principles. http://bit.ly/b7PFQb

Ehn himself raised a number of questions and directions for future work around this (for PD) in his paper from the 2008 PDC conference – Participation in Design of Things.

Sounds like you are doing some great experimentation in your own projects, and there is so much interesting work to be done around understanding how we can support mass participation and public participation through online/social media tools. Also interested to see that you are connected to the Citizen Media project which is another very interesting looking research program. I am going to check out more of the RECORD publications to understand more about the links.

Another great case study that might be of interest is the work by Leisa Reichelt and Mark Boulton in redesigning Drupal.org with the Drupal community – in compliance with the open source collaborative approach. They made use of online tools and social media to support mass participation and communication with the community – they documented it and here’s a great start point http://www.disambiguity.com/designbycommunity/

The people at Owela at VTT (Pirjo Nakki in particular) are also doing interesting work into how online tools can support participation in design. What different kinds of tools and interaction techniques mean etc.

In my own research into how social technologies are impacting on design and participation I have also been inspired by (among many others!) the work of Andrea Botero, Mike Twidale et al. (Patchwork prototyping) and Redhead and Brereton on PD in the community. (Full refs to those mentioned in this paper from ozchi 2009 http://tiny.cc/CQ8xk [pdf] or pres http://slidesha.re/bBrqfp)

Also, in your post you mention a declining knowledge of PD by practitioners. I think Australia is very different to Scandinavia – as here PD is not widely known of – at least not in terms of its traditional/academic and political roots. So rather than a decline its a potential discovery. This is beginning to happen as UX and more human centred approaches are getting more mainstream and the use of / interest in more participatory approaches (or codesign methods) is on the increase – motivated in part by the kinds of interactive technologies we now develop, the inherently participatory nature of social technologies, and the broader phenomena of ‘participation’ now being enabled. However, while people are moving towards more participatory type methods – they aren’t necessarily doing so with the political frameworks/motivations in mind – as you suggest it would be great to have the opportunity to see some of that injected back into design and I think there there are real opportunities for that as UX/service design/x2.0/social and user innovation movements converge.

Enough for now! Thanks again for sharing – look forward to more.
Penny