The culture question in participatory design

As efforts to promote Participatory Design (PD) outside of the Nordic region have grown, how to deal with culture has been perceived as an increasingly pressing issue. This paper explicates the cultural problems PD has had and presents alternative approaches to dealing with them. Anthropology is a discipline that has largely been organized through debates about culture. The paper draws on this discourse to argue against PD's tendency to conceive of culture as a single, unified "thing" with ontological status. Rather, cultural perspectives are produced via use of analytic constructs. PD can develop culturally appropriate senses of both participation and design by learning to decompose totalizing notions of culture. One can begin by separating from each other the aspects of culture relevant to a particular PD project, dealing serially with each of them, and only then attempting to construct a "holistic" cultural account. The argument is largely theoretical, an effort to apply the approach being contained in another paper on what happened when PD was tried in Mozambique.