The Scandinavian participatory design tradition has, over half a century, developed a compelling account of what design can contribute to democratic deliberation and social change. From the workplace democracy projects of the 1970s through the agonistic turn (Björgvinsson, Ehn and Hillgren, 2010; DiSalvo, 2015) to the aesthetic disruption literature discussed in the previous post, the tradition has positioned the designer as a facilitator of participation - someone who convenes diverse actors, stages encounters between perspectives, and creates the conditions under which collective intelligence can emerge. The central commitment is that design can redistribute voice, surface hidden assumptions, and open systems to transformation through structured collaboration.
This post argues that the tradition's account of what happens in participatory encounters is incomplete in ways that matter for practice. The critique draws on three bodies of work that converge on the same gap: Von Busch and Palmås's (2023) political analysis of co-design as inevitably structured by betrayal and corruption; Bailey's (2021) institutional analysis of design-for-government as a form of governmentality; and Nitsun's (1996, 2014) psychoanalytic account of the anti-group - the destructive forces that coexist with, and frequently overwhelm, the constructive potential of any group. Read alongside the social defence tradition that has run through this series, these three perspectives call into question whether participatory design's assumptions about what groups do, what participation achieves, and what the designer's role consists of are sufficient for the settings in which co-design now operates.
The three assumptions
The participatory design tradition, even in its more critical variants, tends to operate on three assumptions. The first is that participants can be convened in good faith - that bringing people together around a shared concern creates, at minimum, the conditions for productive exchange. The second is that surfacing assumptions and staging dissensus produces learning - that once mental models are made visible, they can be examined, contested, and reconstructed. The third is that the designer occupies a position from which genuine participation can be enabled - that the methods and stance of the skilled facilitator can create a space in which power asymmetries are, if not dissolved, at least made workable.
Each of these assumptions has been subject to political critique. Von Busch and Palmås (2023) argue that co-design is a "sordid business" - that its processes "are rife with betrayals" in which "participants' interests are likely to be traded away" (p. 9). Their "Realdesign" insists on Machiavellian power literacy rather than the empathic stance the tradition valorises. Goodwill and Bendor (2021) identify what Bratteteig and Wagner (2014, p. 117) describe as "a tension between the moral stance of participatory design to share power" and the fact that "designers as experts... have considerable power".
Bailey (2021) goes further: her ethnographic study of design-for-government in the UK argues that the protocols and practices of the field produce ideas that "fit" not because they are innovative but "because they are of the same discursive field" (p. 198). Design-for-government, on this account, does not disrupt government but reproduces its logics under the guise of disruption.
These are important critiques, and they share a common structure: they identify a gap between participatory design's self-description and its actual political effects. But they remain within a political register - they see power, corruption, governmentality. What they do not typically foreground is anxiety, defence, and the unconscious life of the group. The social defence tradition and the anti-group literature operate at a different register - one that asks not who holds power but what the group is defending against, and why.
Co-design as institutional myth
Meyer and Rowan's (1977) concept of institutional decoupling describes how organisations maintain formal structures that are ceremonial rather than functional - structures that demonstrate legitimacy to the environment while actual practice proceeds according to different logics. The co-design workshop, in many institutional settings, operates precisely in this register. The organisation commissions a participatory process, convenes stakeholders, produces the artefacts of collaboration - journey maps, opportunity areas, "how might we" statements, prototype concepts - and presents these as evidence that participation has occurred and transformation is underway. The formal structure (the workshop, the report, the recommendations) is decoupled from the actual organisational practice, which continues unchanged.
This decoupling is not necessarily cynical; it may be unconscious. Alvesson and Spicer's (2016) concept of functional stupidity describes how organisations cultivate an "inability and/or unwillingness to use cognitive and reflective capacities in anything other than narrow and circumspect ways" (p. 17). Functional stupidity allows organisations to "avoid the costs of critical thinking" and provide "staff a sense of order, trust and predictability" (p. 9).
Applied to co-design: the workshop becomes a site of functional stupidity - a structured occasion for not-thinking about the things that matter most. Everyone participates, everyone contributes post-its, everyone agrees on priorities; and the agreement functions precisely to foreclose the difficult questions that genuine participation would raise. The gap "between rhetoric and reality" (Alvesson and Spicer, 2016, p. 9) is bridged not by changing reality but by elaborating the rhetoric.
The social defence tradition offers a characteristic diagnostic question: what anxiety is this structure defending against? Applied to the co-design workshop, the question becomes: what does the organisation avoid confronting by performing participation? The answers will vary by context, but the structure is consistent. The workshop defends against the anxiety that the system cannot change, that the problems are structural rather than designable, that participation will surface conflicts the organisation cannot resolve, and that the gap between its espoused values and its actual practices is wider than anyone is prepared to acknowledge.
The production of consensus without the conditions for change is consistent with what the social defence framework would suggest - the workshop disrupts the surface but does not address the defended depth.
The anti-group
Nitsun's (1996, 2014) anti-group concept offers a psychodynamic reading of group dynamics that foregrounds what the political critique tends to leave implicit. Nitsun developed the concept in response to what he saw as a systematic optimism in the group-analytic tradition - a tendency, inherited from Foulkes, to emphasise the group's constructive and therapeutic potential while underestimating its destructive forces. As Nitsun (1996, p. 3) describes it, the anti-group comprises "the negative, disruptive elements, which threaten to undermine and even destroy the group but, when contained, have the potential to mobilise the group's creative processes". The concept names "destructive processes that threaten the functioning of the group" whose sources include "an underlying fear, anxiety, and distrust of the group process" (Nitsun, 1996, p. 6).
The parallels with participatory design are structural. Just as the group-analytic tradition emphasised the group's creative potential, the participatory design tradition emphasises the workshop's generative capacity - its ability to produce ideas, surface perspectives, and create shared understanding. And just as Nitsun argued that this emphasis on the positive obscured real dynamics, the same argument applies to co-design: the tradition's emphasis on collaboration, empathy, and collective intelligence obscures the hostility, sabotage, withdrawal, and defensive compliance that are equally present in any group convened around a difficult task.
The anti-group manifests in co-design settings in recognisable forms. The participant who agrees in the workshop and undermines in the corridor. The stakeholder who attends to demonstrate engagement but has no intention of acting on outcomes. The group that produces a detailed journey map and returns to the exact practices the map was supposed to disrupt. The senior manager who sponsors the process, receives the recommendations, and files them. These are not failures of facilitation or shortcomings in methodology; they are anti-group phenomena - expressions of the group's ambivalence about its own task, its unconscious resistance to the changes that its conscious deliberation endorses.
Bion's (1961) basic assumptions - explored earlier in this series - offer one vocabulary for identifying the specific forms this resistance takes. Dependency: the group treats the facilitator as the expert whose methods will solve the problem, relieving participants of the anxiety of genuine engagement. Fight-flight: the group attacks the process, the brief, or an external enemy - "the IT system", "senior management", "the procurement framework" - instead of engaging with its own complicity in the problem. Pairing: the group invests its hope in a future object - "the next phase", "the pilot", "the implementation roadmap" - that defers engagement with the present difficulty into a perpetually receding horizon.
The designer as target
The anti-group does not operate abstractly; it operates through specific relational dynamics, and the designer is a primary target. Nitsun (1996, p. 7) notes that the anti-group presents "a formidable challenge to the group conductor" and that experienced competence offers no protection against its effects. The facilitator is implicated in the group's transference: idealised as the expert who will make the process work, then attacked when the process surfaces what the group would rather not confront.
The designer's role in institutional settings already functions as a screen for organisational projections; the anti-group literature specifies the mechanism. The designer who facilitates a co-design process in a defended institutional setting is positioned simultaneously as the bearer of hope (they will bring new methods, new perspectives, new possibilities) and as the bearer of threat (they will expose what the institution has arranged not to see).
Von Busch and Palmås (2023) describe this dynamic politically - as the inevitable corruption of the designer's position within power relations. The psychodynamic tradition describes the same dynamic structurally - as projective identification, in which the system deposits its own unbearable material (its failure, its hypocrisy, its incapacity for change) into the designer, who then carries it. The designer who feels useless, contemptible, or professionally inadequate after a co-design engagement may not be experiencing their own limitations; they may be carrying the system's projected self-knowledge.
What this means for practice
The argument is not that co-design should be abandoned but that its self-understanding needs to be revised. The tradition's emphasis on the constructive potential of participation is not wrong; it is half the picture. As Nitsun (1996, p. 7) insists, the anti-group is "not conceived as a monolithic force that inevitably destroys the group" - when contained, destructive forces "have the potential to mobilise the group's creative processes". The question, as it has been throughout this series, is containment.
A co-design practice informed by the anti-group concept and the social defence tradition would differ from current practice in several respects. It would begin by asking the diagnostic question - what anxiety is the organisation defending against, and what role is the co-design process being asked to play in that defence? - before designing the participatory process. It would anticipate anti-group dynamics as inevitable rather than as evidence of failure, and it would design the process to contain them: smaller groups, longer timeframes, reflective pauses, attention to what is not being said rather than what is being captured on post-its. It would attend to the designer's countertransference as a primary source of data about the system - the feelings the designer experiences during facilitation as communications from the group about its own defended state.
It would also attend to who is being asked to carry what. As Bailey (2021) demonstrates, the designer's authority in institutional settings is not neutral; it is constituted by the same governmentality that structures the institution itself. The designer who believes they are enabling participation may be performing a ceremony that legitimates existing arrangements. The designer who believes they are surfacing assumptions may be activating defences they have no framework to recognise. The designer who believes the post-its represent the group's genuine priorities may be reading the products of functional stupidity - the group's carefully curated avoidance of what it cannot bear to think.
This is, as Von Busch and Palmås (2023, p. 10) put it, a call for designers to "engage with the negative valence of power politics". The psychodynamic tradition adds: and with the negative valence of group life itself - with the destructive, hostile, sabotaging, withdrawing forces that are not aberrations of participation but constitutive features of any group convened around an anxiety-provoking task. A co-design practice without vocabulary for what Nitsun calls the anti-group and Bion calls the basic assumption mentality may find itself repeatedly encountering dynamics that its existing frameworks struggle to account for, and attributing them to causes - poor facilitation, resistant stakeholders, insufficient buy-in - that miss the psychodynamic register entirely.
References
Alvesson, M. & Spicer, A. (2016). The Stupidity Paradox: The Power and Pitfalls of Functional Stupidity at Work. London: Profile Books.
Bailey, J.A. (2021). Governmentality and Power in 'Design for Government' in the UK, 2008-2017: An Ethnography of an Emerging Field. PhD thesis. Brighton: University of Brighton.
Bion, W.R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. London: Tavistock.
Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P. & Hillgren, P.-A. (2010). Participatory Design and "Democratizing Innovation". In Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference. New York: ACM.
Bratteteig, T. & Wagner, I. (2014). Disentangling Participation: Power and Decision-Making in Participatory Design. Cham: Springer.
DiSalvo, C. (2015). Adversarial Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Goodwill, M. & Bendor, R. (2021). Beyond Good Intentions: Towards a Power Literacy Framework for Service Designers. International Journal of Design, 15(3), 1–16.
Meyer, J.W. & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340–363.
Nitsun, M. (1996). The Anti-Group: Destructive Forces in the Group and Their Creative Potential. London: Psychology Press.
Nitsun, M. (2014). Beyond the Anti-Group: Survival and Transformation. London: Routledge.
Von Busch, O. & Palmås, K. (2023). The Corruption of Co-Design: Political and Social Conflicts in Participatory Design Thinking. London: Taylor & Francis.