Beyond Methods in Participatory Design: Affect, Power and the Micro-Dynamics of Participation

Abstract

Participatory Design (PD) has often understood participation as something produced through methods and formal activities, privileging visible contributions and rational deliberation. In doing so, it has overlooked the emotional and embodied forces through which participation is continuously produced and contested. Drawing on affect theory, this article positions affect, emotions, and feelings as constitutive micro‑dynamics of participation: they precede, exceed, and intersect with methods while informing power relations and decision‑making. Engaging PD scholarship and affect theory, it examines affect, the circulation of emotions and affective atmospheres as conditions for collective action. It proposes affective micro‑dynamics as a lens for understanding participation beyond methods and formal activities. Attending to affect challenges method‑centric, positivist and patriarchal assumptions in PD and reframes participation as a lived, embodied and politically situated practice.