Participatory Research Through Design (pRtD) converges participatory design, embodied design and research through design, to critically and speculatively open experimental spaces of inquiry that support research participants to think through challenging issues by moving, making and doing. To enact pRtD, a researcher employs embodied, performative methods to engage participants in critical reflection and social critique through everyday activities, often defamiliarising these activities to support embodied engagement in creative play with research ideas and techniques, while the research is in process. The emphasis on process, rather than outcome, is critical to the power of pRtD as a methodology for transformative change-making. PRtD has been developed to support participant-led embodied-poetic engagement with matters of concern; rich discussions around possible futures; and consideration of broad potentialities of emerging propositions as they unfold. The approach diverges in important ways from Research through Design, and its emphasis on the research artefact. It builds out of the Scandinavian approach to participatory design, cocreation and codesign, finding relations in 'democratic participatory design practices' (Light, 2015) and 'experiments' (Binder et al., 2015) in that it is fundamentally political in its intentions and outcomes. It is also highly particular in its instantiations. With these legacies and orientations, pRtD resists being understood as a framework or reduced to a formula that might support replication. Rather, pRtD can be understood as a methodological stance that invites new understandings of the potentials of research through design, codesign, and research through co-design.
2025-03-17: Publication in press.