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“Make Friends Not Art: Mapping Law, Power and Participation in Designing an Online Platform during documenta fifteen” details an instance of participatory design work that happened in the context of a large scale arts festival in Germany. It tells the story of how I was involved in the design of an online platform in the context of that festival but found the process frustrated as both festival’s production company and the media in Germany drew on specific legal frameworks to shape and constrain both the nature of the platform and the wider festival. In other words, it is a story of how capitalist and colonial dynamics can seep in to such projects and the specific ways that can happen.

In the paper we discuss two examples of how the law and various actors exploiting or threatening to exploit the law’s protective intentions became unanticipated actors influencing the platform and the perception of the festival. Ann and me drew on actor network theory to map these forces in an attempt to understand the ways they had influence and what that could mean for future participatory design projects.

The paper was presented at Participatory Design Conference 2024 in Sibu, Sarawak, Malaysia. The presentation slides can be found here (press p for presentation mode). The paper builds on an earlier PDC contribution of mine.

The paper itself can be found here https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3666094.3666107 (mirror).