2025 Theses Doctoral

Disintegrations: Design, Labor and Participation circa 1970

Stewart-Halevy, Samuel

This dissertation traces the emergence, transformation, and dissemination of participatory design across architecture, planning, and workplace organization from the 1960s to the 1980s, situating it within the broader political economy of post-Fordist restructuring.

Through three interrelated case studies -- in the regional industrial districts of Emilia-Romagna (with a focus on Rimini), in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Mantua, and automating Scandinavian firms from weapons factories to newsrooms -- I examine how participatory design operated as a tool of eliciting input and a form of design labor in itself. While the practice has often been narrated within architectural history as a short-lived avant-garde experiment, I argue that its persistence, migration across professional domains, and adaptation to changing political conditions reveal its deeper role as a mediating tool between capital and labor during a period of economic and technological transition.

The study follows designers, planners, trade unionists, neighborhood activists, and management scientists -- including Giancarlo De Carlo in Rimini; Herman Wrice, Russell Ackoff, Forrest Adams, Merle Easton and Richard Plunz in Mantua; and Kristen Nygaard, Pelle Ehn and members of Ergonomi Design Gruppen in Oslo and Stockholm -- who, working under distinct regimes of Eurocommunism, U.S. urban capitalism, and Scandinavian social democracy, developed participatory techniques to reorganize relations of production at the scales of district, neighborhood, and firm. A common array of extractive objects and devices can be discerned across (and despite) these disparate geographies: interactive mock-ups and prototypes, solicited sketches and plans, cognitive maps and transects, questionnaires and mood boards, primers and textbooks, structured forms of play, and forms of televisual feedback designed to make work processes and social relations visible, negotiable, and reconfigurable. As designers moved closer to the “real world” of engaged practice, their participants became more immersed in virtual simulations, and as the number of participants expanded and “took part,” the artifacts that they used became more fragmented, mobile, and provisional.

Drawing on archival research, interviews, and close analysis of encounters between designers and participants, I show how participatory design’s multiple points of origin and disciplinary crossings were shaped by overlapping traditions of pragmatism, anarchism, bureaucratic planning, and corporate management science. Rather than a marginal or purely oppositional practice, participatory design emerges in the study as a historically situated form of post-Fordist work: one that recasts the designer as a “phatic expert,” whose primary task is to facilitate communication, configure users, and manage collaborative production across spatial and organizational scales. In reframing the history of participatory design in relation to shifting modes of accumulation, this dissertation connects its architectural manifestations to its proliferation in service design, user interface development, and other contemporary fields, revealing both the continuities and transformations of participation as a tool of design and governance.