Bridging Distances for Global Participation : Conducting and Theorizing Participatory Design and Research in Hybrid Contexts

Participatory Design (PD) must increasingly be able to serve various global contexts. Overall, a fundamental need has been identified in the PD community to raise previously unheard global voices in design and development work, and to bring various underrepresented stakeholders together. On the other hand, the rapid adoption of various synchronous and asynchronous communication methods through collaborative online tools offers opportunities for more dispersed and more diverse PD research teams, settings and processes. This raises new possibilities for bridging global distances and bringing various stakeholders together for the purposes of conducting multicultural, multi-site PD. Importantly, while there exists extensive research literatures both on PD, on remote ethnography and on Computer-Supported Collaborative Work, we posit that these literatures have not been brought together; nor have the practices and methodologies of these communities been sufficiently jointly explored to support the goals of multisite, multicultural PD. In this workshop, we strive to bridge this gap in knowledge through exploring the opportunities of conducting hybrid multi-site Participatory Design (HMPD) research through synchronous and asynchronous present-telepresent participatory methods, and to share issues, challenges, opportunities, methods and empirical examples pertaining to this as a goal.