(In)Visible Participants

Abstract What should we understand about designing against infrastructures of oppression and marginalization? Research articles and social technologies produced by our design community have focused on procedures for action. Through this technicist approach, we have often disregarded the experiences of the participants of this type of design process, excluding their voices from institutionalized design knowledge, and thus replicating their invisibility. To overcome this, it is necessary to understand what characterizes people’s experiences and drives their participation, how these processes and practices interweave with their lives, and to bring their voices to the core of our research outcomes. These reflections emerge out of interviews with the participants of a design project in a Brazilian favela. The need for a more complex and multilayered perspective for design processes against infrastructures of oppression and marginalization emerges, together with the understanding of desire and affection, as critical factors in the process of unmaking them.