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Dear Pedro, I think you have gotten pretty well this relationship. In the last paragraph you mention the main areas for searching. However, the advent of user-centered and experience design in the U.S.A. is corporate sponsored despite of its packaging as a grass root development. You can discuss the movement in the U.S.A. and find out to what degree it is initiated by corporations and to what degree it is spurred by the opportunities that a democracy presents to people. And you might find very surprising things. In the software and the telecommunication industries, there is a very strong corporate initiative. It is the market that drives corporations to search for user expertise. (This is not classic participation; rather, it is a form of using users as experts regarding their needs.) On the other hand, the Scandinavian participatory moment comes from "below," from the masses. I think that your best option is to search for the relationship between democracy and participation using the Scandinavian tradition. Actually, participation started in the 1950's over there as participatory management. After that it spreads to urban planning and architecture. The current buzz in software engineering and HCI is a late offspring. However, because of the money in these industries and the better realization of the importance of users, the participatory field there currently is more advanced. Also, it is important in which fields you search for case study materials. In architecture, participation is clearly a product of a democratic society, both in Scandinavia and in the U.S.A. See the work of Henry Sanoff, who initiated and advanced this academic area in architecture. He works very consistently in this area since the late 1950's. His academic work is based on his architectural projects that typically follow the process of participatory design. Best wishes, Lubomir Lubomir Popov, PhD School of Family and Consumer Sciences American Culture Studies Affiliated Faculty Bowling Green State University 309 Johnston Hall, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403-0059 [log in to unmask] 419.372.7835 -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Pedro Oliveira Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2014 10:00 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: User Experience Research and Democracy Dear List Members, Is anyone on this list working on the relation between user experience research and democracy? Alternatively, can anyone please point me to resources in this area? To provide some quick context: I’m a corporate ethnographer working in Portugal. Portugal is many things, amongst them, a country with only forty years of democracy and some of the highest levels of corruptions in Europe, both corporate and political (as per Transparency International 2013 annual report). In fieldwork assignments around retail and work software I have been noticing people finding incredibly deep, time-consuming, complex and detailed strategies of human cooperation across individuals and across groups, in order to cope with the many difficulties posed by the software; this often comes with a sense of helplessness and hopelessness around feeling that their voice on this software, whatever that voice is, will be able to produce any kind of change. Overall there is the feeling that it is people that must adapt to the difficulties posed by software or technology in general, rather than the other way round. This is no different from the way people seem to talk about government and political representation, as expressed by a nearly seventy per cent abstention in the recent European elections. Towards government, or even towards the idea of political representation in general, there is an overall feeling that critical participation and/or voicing of one's views on the matter, can hardly lead to any form of significant change. It has recently dawn on me that the similarities between the discourse towards technology and the discourse towards political representation found in this country (passive acceptance of the “authority” contained in the technology or in the government) are traits of a country with a very short history of democracy. I wonder if other people here also see a relation between historical duration of democracy and a concern with the end user. In other words: is the concern with the end user a characteristic of countries/cultures with a longer history of democracy? The fact that plenty of work on user experience research and human centered design has originated in the American context, and the fact that fields such as participatory design have really gained a significant expression in Scandinavia (with its well-built historical tradition of social democracy) may help to consubstantiate this point of view. I would really love to hear about this by people in the list. Thanking you in advance. Yours, Pedro PhD Anthropologist/Independent Ethnographic Consultant/Global Partner at Practica LLC ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]> Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design -----------------------------------------------------------------