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From its earliest days, participatory design has been shaped by a single, unresolved tension: who should decide what technology is built, and how is power distributed in that process? Unlike user-centered design, which treats users as informants whose needs are extracted and interpreted by experts, participatory design insists that the people who will live with a system must have a direct hand in shaping it. But what that means in practice—whether participation is a political right, a collaborative method, or a way to surface productive conflict—has shifted dramatically over five decades. The frameworks that have emerged from this debate each offer a different answer to the same question, and their disagreements remain alive today.
The first framework, the Collective Resource Approach, grew out of Scandinavian labor movements in the 1970s. In Norway and Sweden, trade unions and researchers began to ask how computer systems could serve workers rather than simply automate their jobs. The landmark UTOPIA project (1981–1985) brought together graphic workers, union representatives, and computer scientists to design a system for newspaper production. The core idea was that workers should control the technological resources that affected their labor—not just be consulted, but have collective bargaining power over design decisions. This was not a neutral usability exercise; it was a political intervention. The Collective Resource Approach treated design as a negotiation between labor and management, with researchers acting as allies of workers. Its methods included workplace studies, mock-ups, and organizational change, but its defining commitment was to shifting power. This framework established the political foundation that all later participatory design frameworks would either build on or react against.
By the early 1990s, participatory design had moved from the factory floor into the broader world of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. The Cooperative Design framework, sometimes called the Scandinavian approach, adapted the political commitments of the Collective Resource Approach to a new context: design projects that involved users not as a collective bargaining unit but as partners in co-creation. The shift was both methodological and ideological. Instead of adversarial negotiation, Cooperative Design emphasized mutual learning—designers learned about users' practices, and users learned about technological possibilities—and iterative prototyping with low-fidelity tools like paper mock-ups. The famous "cardboard computer" exercises at Aarhus University exemplified this hands-on, egalitarian style. Compared to the Collective Resource Approach, Cooperative Design narrowed the political edge: it moved from labor-union confrontation to collaborative workshops, often within organizations where the power imbalance was less explicit. Yet it preserved the core principle that users should be active participants, not passive subjects. This framework became the dominant model for participatory design in HCI through the 1990s, influencing methods like contextual inquiry and participatory prototyping.
As participatory design matured, practitioners began to notice a limitation: even the most successful cooperative design projects often ended when the prototype was delivered. The system might be used for a while, but the relationships, skills, and resources built during the project could dissolve. Infrastructuring emerged in the early 2000s to address this problem by reframing design as an ongoing process of building and maintaining shared socio-technical resources—not a one-time intervention. Drawing on science and technology studies, this framework treats design as the creation of "infrastructure" that evolves through use: standards, protocols, platforms, and community practices that persist beyond any single project. Infrastructuring absorbs the collaborative methods of Cooperative Design—mutual learning, prototyping—but extends them across time. It also revives the political concern of the Collective Resource Approach by asking who controls the infrastructure and how it can be sustained by communities themselves. Today, Infrastructuring is widely used in domains like civic technology, open-source communities, and healthcare, where long-term engagement is essential. Its distinctive contribution is to shift the unit of analysis from the project to the ongoing socio-technical system.
Agonistic Design, the most recent framework, emerged from a growing dissatisfaction with the consensus orientation of both Cooperative Design and Infrastructuring. Drawing on the political theory of Chantal Mouffe, this framework argues that design should not aim for harmony or agreement but should instead embrace productive conflict. Where earlier frameworks sought to align stakeholders around shared goals, Agonistic Design deliberately creates spaces where different values and interests can clash—not to paralyze, but to make power visible and negotiable. For example, an agonistic design intervention might stage a debate about a public space, using provocative artifacts to surface disagreements that consensus-oriented methods would smooth over. Compared to Infrastructuring, which focuses on building durable systems, Agonistic Design focuses on staging temporary encounters that reveal political tensions. It revives the confrontational spirit of the Collective Resource Approach but replaces labor-union politics with a broader theory of democratic contestation. This framework remains a minority position within participatory design, but it has gained traction in fields like urban planning, policy design, and critical HCI, where the goal is not to solve a problem but to open up new questions.
Today, Infrastructuring and Agonistic Design are the two leading frameworks in participatory design, and they coexist in a productive tension. They agree on several points: design is inherently political, participation must be ongoing rather than project-bound, and the voices of marginalized stakeholders are essential. Both reject the idea that a designer can stand outside the process as a neutral facilitator. Where they disagree is on the role of conflict. Infrastructuring tends to assume that with enough time and care, stakeholders can build shared resources through negotiation and mutual learning. Agonistic Design counters that some disagreements are fundamental and cannot be resolved—only staged and made visible. This disagreement is not a weakness; it reflects the subfield's enduring commitment to democratic pluralism. In practice, the two frameworks often complement each other: an infrastructuring project might use agonistic methods to surface hidden tensions early, then build infrastructure that accommodates those tensions. The Collective Resource Approach and Cooperative Design remain influential as historical foundations, and their principles—worker control and mutual learning—continue to inform new work, especially in contexts where power imbalances are stark. Participatory design has never settled its central question, and that is precisely what keeps it alive. The frameworks are not a linear progression but a set of ongoing conversations about how to make technology more democratic.