ABSTRACT
The author had the fortune to be a member of the participatory design community for almost half a century and the privilege to participate in what would call democratic design experiments in the small. The 1990s centered on being part of establishing an academic design-oriented community linked to the democratic visions of participatory design. Nygaard and colleagues had since 1970 worked together with the Norwegian Metal Workers Union (NJMF) on introduction of computers at the workplace. The Utopia project, a participatory design research project, was set up to explore the challenge and eventually to design skills-based technology for newspaper production. It was a collaboration between the graphic workers' unions in all the Nordic countries and an interdisciplinary group of researchers and designers. Winograd, Lave, and Suchman were all active in Computer Scientists for Social Responsibility in the Bay area and had a genuine interest in democratic design experiments as explored in Scandinavia.
