Design that keeps designing: designing for participation

What role does participation take when engaging the public in communication design projects? What considerations and capacities in the communication design process and practice are required to enable participation? These questions are considered in this paper through critically reflecting on a project entitled Fashion City, which explored engaging the public as co-author of the communication content. The unexpected and confronting outcomes of the project provided valuable insights into designing for participation. The paper summarises three of the key lessons learned during the project that revolved around issues of releasing control and de-centralising the designer and the outcome of design. Following the understandings arising from the project, a 'scaffold' model is proposed. This scaffold can act as a framework that respects the individual's agency and their participation as well as their rights to choose to ignore or interact, engage or disengage in a 'conversation' initiated through design. These scaffolds may be risky and unconventional to normative commercial processes, however, it is argued that they can lead to generative situations of uncertainty and indeterminacy to occur, enabling the discovery of new concepts, knowledge and practices in communication design.