Engaging with ghosts, idiots & ______ - Otherness in Participatory Design

This paper is an experiment to engage with ghosts, idiots, with the unspoken –––––– and with the notion of ‘Otherness’ (Law 2004). By understanding writing as an enactment, a practice in-the-making, we invite you to join us in this
experiment. We describe experiences of Otherness from our design-research and show how the roles of ghosts, idiots and Others can unsettle participatory design events, while helping to address existing hegemonic structures, including the ones we create as design-researchers. On a second level, this contribution is a reflection of the ghosts we create through re-presented experience in writing about co-design events, and on how to possibly invite Otherness also in the re-presentation of research. This is a risky and troublesome process, but we invite you to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016).