Designing with as People The (untold) story of the wellbeing trolley Juan Sanin School of Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia juan.sanin@rmit.edu.au ABSTRACT The expression ‘designing with people’ predefnes paradigmatic roles for designers and people collaborating in a design process. This paper challenges this paradigm and asks what other forms of collaboration would look like and what expressions could we use to defne them. It shares a personal account of a project originally aimed at designing tools for doing sensory therapies in a psychi- atric unit, but where the people working and living there did not assume the role of participants and I had to collaborate with them in their own terms and ended up making an arts trolley. Building on autonomous design, I propose the expression ‘designing as people’ to make sense of this experience. In the context of this conference, ‘designing as people’ is a provocation and invitation to explore forms of collaborative design where designers move away from the role of facilitators to become participants of creative processes of communities and learn to design in the ways that those who are not designers do it. KEYWORDS Participation otherwise, designing as people, arts in health ACM Reference Format: Juan Sanin. 2020. Designing with as People: The (untold) story of the wellbeing trolley. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Confer- ence 2020- Participation(s) Otherwise - Vol. 2 (PDC ’20: Vol. 2), June 15– 20, 2020, Manizales, Colombia. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https: //doi.org/10.1145/3384772.3385150 1 INTRODUCTION The expression ‘designing with people’ has institutionalised a spe- cifc idea of how participatory design is done. Popular publications explain that participation is about bringing together two diferent worlds ś the abstract world where designers work and the con- crete world where people live ś to create a ‘realm of collaboration’ or a ‘third space’ [1]-[3]. Designers facilitate this intersection in codesign activities using probes, toolkits, and prototypes that help people to enact, tell or make and contribute in creative ways to design processes [4, 5]. Of course, there are other forms of collabo- rating, but in general terms this is what we (are supposed to) do when we are doing design participation. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. PDC ’20: Vol. 2, June 15–20, 2020, Manizales, Colombia © 2020 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-7606-8/20/06. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3384772.3385150 How is participation done beyond this ideal ‘realm of collabora- tion’? What other expressions could defne it? What has to be un- learned to recognise other forms of collaboration as participation? What can be learned from these ‘other’ participatory experiences? This paper explores how forms participation beyond traditional paradigms would look like and what names they could have. In doing this, I share personal experiences of a project run in collab- oration with a psychiatric unit, where the people I was supposed to design with were not interested in becoming ‘my participants’. They did not want to leave the concrete world where they live and take part in the codesign activities I proposed to constitute the realm of collaboration. I explain how to overcome this challenge I had to unlearn codesign and engage with people in their own space and their own terms. Inspired by ideas derived from autonomous design, in particular, that ‘every community practice the design of itself’ and that ‘people are practitioners of their own knowledge’ [6], I make sense of this experience through the expression ‘designing as people’ (DaP). I propose to consider DaP as a form of participation otherwise or with other names [7], and more precisely, a way of doing PD in which designers participate in the co-creative practices that com- munities have in their own worlds (rather than bringing people to a third space to participate in our design processes). As a conceptual construct, DaP is a humble attempt to put PD into dialogue with ideas around autonomous design and an invitation to reorient par- ticipatory principles to bring non-disruptive design interventions that communities can creatively appropriate in their own worlds. In the personal account I engage with the politics of self- representation and explore other ways of writing PD [8]. I build on Duque and Popplow use of _______ and crossed words [9, 10] and make use of parentheses as a narrative strategy to acknowledge the complexity of my own historical personality [11] and account for personal experiences that are usually ignored in traditional aca- demic writing. In doing this, I try to move away from academic publishing to write as people: as a designer participating in the creative activities of a community (and as myself: a migrant who thought that ways of doing design in the south had no place in a new life in the north, and learned a new design language; but who realised that the south is everywhere, but it can remain invisible because its plurality is spoken in many diferent ways). 2 UNLEARNING CO-DESIGN. LEARNING TO DESIGN AS PEOPLE I am a newcomer to PD. In my ‘previous life’ in the South, I studied how local people participate in their own ways in design processes and worked doing projects with communities, but it was only af- ter migrating to the Global North that I associated what I used to do with PD. Back there, I worked with colleagues of the UPB