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 


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