About
Participation Requests (PRs) are a mechanism within the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 that enables people and communities to shape decisions and services that affect their lives by taking part in an outcome improvement process with a relevant public service authority. Recent research and evaluation around the efficacy of PRs has underlined a need to increase access for communities, improve transparency and understanding in PR guidance, and build capacity and confidence in people and communities to play an active role in their local areas. At the same time, the need is identified for public service authorities to develop targeted and tailored support for less organised groups, capture positive examples of the PR process, create community-led resources, and organise interactive workshops to provide practical advice and input. Responding to these assessments, this research project sought to further explore such challenges and identify opportunities to address these recommendations.
Led by Dr Cara Broadley from the Innovation School at The Glasgow School of Art, Social Studios aimed to understand how Participatory Design can support people, communities, and public authorities in the preparation, submission, and implementation of PRs. The central premise of PRs resonates with Participatory Design’s aims to readdress power imbalances in society and enhance equitable dialogue to inform sustainable change. Design as a discipline has evolved from a problem-solving profession towards a sense-making capability and a practice that produces insight to shape new services, experiences, systems, and policies. Participatory Design foregrounds the use of bespoke and flexible methods including sketching, mapping, 3D modelling tasks, prototyping, and design games to engage with people and communities and build upon their reflections and ideas to envisage new ways of living and working. Consequently, the role of the design user can be seen to evolve from a consumer to a respondent, to a participant, to a co-designer, who actively contributes to the design process and generates new concepts and proposals.
A range of communities, policy professionals, and academics have been involved in Social Studios to share their experiences and insights surrounding PRs and to contribute to framing, co-designing, and evaluating a Toolbox to support productive engagement in PRs. Through developing Social Studios as virtual workshops and collaborating with twelve representatives from community groups across Scotland, the research applied Participatory Design methods to generate a suite of fifteen tools for improving how PRs are promoted, accessed, interpreted, developed, submitted, and resolved.
The prototype PR Toolbox has been shared initially with people, communities, and organisations across Scotland to develop an action plan for further dissemination, testing, and iteration. The research has led to a series of reflections and recommendations concerning the future of PRs and the role of Participatory Design in such contexts of local decision-making. These findings are currently being applied to shape further design research surrounding democratic innovation in Scotland, with the ambition to develop new approaches and frameworks for participatory policymaking in devolved contexts.