Scaling Care-fully: Uncovering Labours of Care When Scaling Participatory Design in the Public Sector

Paper Title

Scaling Care-fully: Uncovering Labours of Care When Scaling Participatory Design in the Public Sector

Publication Info

• Topic area: Participatory Design (PD) and care ethics in public sector scaling efforts.
• Keywords: Participatory Design, care ethics, scaling, public sector, backstage processes, migrant integration, reflexivity, affective labour, infrastructuring.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Scaling Participatory Design (PD) efforts often leads to ethical and practical challenges, including risks of undermining PD’s historical commitments to empowerment and democracy. Existing frameworks for scaling PD lack clarity and fail to address the backstage processes and invisible labour involved.
• Significance: Addressing these challenges is crucial for ensuring meaningful, sustainable, and ethical PD practices, especially in contexts involving vulnerable populations such as migrants.
• Motivation and related work: While PD has traditionally focused on localised engagements, there is increasing demand to scale its scope and impact to address larger societal issues. Prior work has explored concepts like institutioning and infrastructuring but lacks practical strategies for scaling with care. Feminist care ethics provides a promising lens to address these gaps.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The concept of "scaling care-fully," which integrates feminist care ethics into PD practices to uncover and address the invisible labours of care required for scaling.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduction of 13 types of care labour involved in scaling PD, grounded in Joan Tronto’s care ethics framework.
  2. Reflexive analysis of backstage processes in PD activities, focusing on migrant integration services in Finland.
  3. Strategies for implementing care-full scaling, emphasizing relationality, reflexivity, and infrastructuring.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Reflexive sessions with researchers, public servants, and NGO representatives to identify backstage processes.
  • Thematic analysis of session transcripts, coded into 13 labours of care aligned with Tronto’s dimensions: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and solidarity.
  • Visualization of project activities and backstage efforts using knotworking and infrastructuring concepts.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Identified 13 labours of care, including introspective labour, labour of reciprocating participant effort, labour of navigating bureaucracy, and labour of relationships.
  • Highlighted the importance of backstage processes like emotional regulation, logistical preparation, and relationship-building in scaling PD.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Provides a nuanced understanding of the invisible efforts required for scaling PD, addressing gaps in existing frameworks.
  • Offers strategies to mitigate risks of co-optation and maintain PD’s ethos of empowerment and mutual learning.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Empirical work conducted in the context of migrant integration services in Espoo, Finland, involving reflexive sessions with seven participants from academia, public sector, and NGOs.
  • Data analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis, supported by visual tools like Miro boards and project timelines.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited data from care receivers (migrant participants), resulting in incomplete analysis of responsiveness.
  • Findings are context-specific and exploratory, requiring further research to operationalize strategies for broader applicability.
  • Future work could focus on integrating participant perspectives and developing practical tools for reflexivity in PD.

Summary

This paper introduces "scaling care-fully," a framework for scaling Participatory Design (PD) in the public sector using feminist care ethics. By identifying 13 labours of care and analyzing backstage processes, the study highlights the invisible efforts required for ethical and meaningful scaling. Empirical work in Finland’s migrant integration services demonstrates the importance of reflexivity, infrastructuring, and relationality in scaling PD. While exploratory, the findings provide strategies to maintain PD’s ethos and address challenges in scaling, offering valuable insights for HCI researchers and practitioners.