Welcome to a K3 seminar with Kate Ferguson, participatory designer, RMIT University, Melbourne .

The title of the talk is:

Agonistic Navigating: Exploring and (Re)configuring Youth Participation in Design

The seminar will take place on Wednesday, April 6 at 10.15-12.00. It will be a hybrid seminar. Please either come to room NiB0501 or join online here:

https://mau-se.zoom.us/j/64675687916 (this is the zoom link to all K3 seminars this term).

The seminar is a collaboration with the Collaborative Future-Making Platform.

Kate Ferguson has recently completed a PhD at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. With a professional background in architecture, placemaking, public engagement, and community projects, she has a longstanding interest in the way people participate in shaping the built environment.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

This seminar will discuss agonistic navigating as a politically engaged participatory design practice. 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. Agonistic navigating articulates the practice I developed to do this over the course of my PhD research in Sydney, Australia. I set out to investigate problems related to youth participation in the design of public spaces such as parks and squares, and I worked with both 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 toward the emergence of new practices over time. I will discuss 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. I developed a project to design and build a “chill space” for a local park with a group of ten-sixteen year olds, and in this I found myself navigating with and between matters of concern such as voice, decision-making, and fun. 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. Along my PhD journey, I transitioned my design practice: rather than a “solution” to the problems of current youth participation processes, I developed a practice of working with the inevitable politics of participatory design in a conscious and reflexive manner.