ABSTRACT
Chapter 2.10 examines the case of participatory design in healthcare to explore whether and how current practices take into account space and the spatiality of both care and co-design itself. The author reviews recent examples of participatory design in healthcare and the particular case of experience-based co-design to foreground how the spaces in which these participatory practices take place can participate in (re-)organizing power relations, constituting specific forms of care, and challenging or reproducing the exclusion of marginalized voices.
The chapter draws upon relational understandings of space as proposed by British geographer Doreen Massey. It also borrows from the design literature of the last 15 years, which has examined in some depth how design has historically contributed to the reproduction of unequal social orders but also proposed radical shifts in its own practices to produce more sustainable worlds. The chapter shows how insights from these different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives illuminate ways in which the spatiality of participatory design in healthcare can contribute to bringing into existence more equitable and sustainable processes and practices of care.
