Agonistic navigating: exploring and (re)configuring youth participation in design
Creators: name: Ferguson, Kate
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330310
subject: Interaction and experience design
classificationCode: 330411
subject: Urban design

description: This thesis proposes and demonstrates agonistic navigating as a politically engaged participatory design (PD) practice. Developed through a design research project in Sydney, Australia, agonistic navigating articulates the way I worked to uphold and (re)configure political commitments within the complexity, uncertainty and tensions of participatory practice. I set out to investigate problems related to youth participation in the design of public spaces, such as lack of influence in decision-making, poor communication, and non-inclusive or unappealing methods. I chose to work with young people who are often overlooked in participation processes, and local government who run these processes. This entailed an agonistic infrastructuring approach of respecting different views, aligning interests, and working with people and things toward the emergence of new practices over time. After developing a partnership with the municipal City of Blacktown in northwest Sydney, I spent nine months meeting council staff, learning about the infrastructures that support public participation and the design of public spaces, and engaging with young people. This led to the design and facilitation of the Bidwill Chill Space Project: a program of nine workshops with a group of ten-to-sixteen year olds to design and build a "chill space" for a local park. Along the research journey, I transitioned my design practice: rather than a "solution" to the problems of current youth participation processes, I developed an agonistic navigating practice that lives with the inevitable politics of participatory design in a conscious and reflexive manner.

In recent years there has been interest in the way PD can open up contested and uncertain issues, and promote engagement without the need for consensus. My research was inspired by these approaches, and contributes to these discussions. I highlight the reflexive work of orienting and anchoring myself in the fieldwork site, and manoeuvring in relations with council to leverage political will and maintain engagement. Within the Bidwill Chill Space Project, I found myself navigating with and between uncertain and contested matters of concern such as voice, decision-making, and fun. As a facilitator I juggled between these many matters, and given their uncertain nature we worked to articulate what they meant for us in the particular situation. Here, moments of unsettlement prompted reflection on the way participation had been configured through planning, and opened possibilities for re-configuring participation according to what mattered for participants. Through this process, I was able to see how I had conflated voice with decision-making, and re-configure voice as "design fingerprints and trails": the collection, mediation and transformation of design ideas over time. Further, I expanded my understanding of youth participation beyond the dominant norm of adult-facilitated activities, to include everyday, youth-initiated actions that sustain engagement in the long term. Agonistic navigating is thus a dynamic practice of configuring and re-configuring understandings and practices of participation, and through this articulation I seek to enrich discussions in PD about the nature of participation.