Reflecting on Collaboration in Participatory Design Facilitation

While democratic practices, balancing powers, mutual learning and tools and techniques are the principles of Participatory Design (PD), they are all influenced by the practice of PD "facilitation" and the role of the facilitator(s). Facilitation in PD has been usually studied as a single entity with a facilitator that faces dilemmas in her/his role in relation to PD participants and her/his own motives and values. In this paper, we contribute to PD facilitation practice literature by studying facilitation as collaboration work compounded by many entities. We conducted a reflective analysis of the facilitation practices in two PD projects that we have managed. We found that PD projects have a multitude of facilitators. These facilitators belong to four categories: user experts, domain experts, PD experts and assistant facilitators. In time and in different PD activities facilitators may join or leave the project and also shift between categories while their expertise expands. We define this as "the network of facilitators" and discuss how such a perspective can help to improve the facilitation practice in PD.