Mirrors: Reflecting the PDC Community

Since its first edition in 1990, the Participatory Design Conference (PDC) community has continued to evolve by bringing together researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplinary and cultural backgrounds [1]. A key aspect at the center of this community's practice has been research and design exploration in the context of Information and Communication Technologies [2,3]. Since the 1990s the PDC community has investigated Participatory Design (PD) practice in diverse and multi-faceted directions - from work focused on accountability and user involvement in the design process [4,5] to best processes and tools to enable diverse stakeholders to engage in co-design activities [6,7,8,9], experimental innovation and open-ended processes [10,11,12,13,14], PD practice decolonization [15,16,17] and pluriversality in PD practice [18,19] to name a few examples. Over the past three decades PD practice evolved greatly, as did its community. However, while PD practice and its evolution is documented [20,21,22,23], our understanding and documentation of how the PD community itself evolved over time is limited. This Situated Action focuses on an effort to deepen our understanding of the PD community by leveraging PD practice and actively involving the community in depicting (and, in the process, critiquing) its own profile.