This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of key themes and agendas in contemporary Participatory Design across diverse disciplines, continents, communities, and practices. Building on Participatory Design’s core values of empowerment and democracy, the handbook explores how the field is developing and diversifying to address contemporary societal challenges in a global community.

Participatory Design actively engages peoples, groups and other actors in collaborative design processes to explore and co-create their everyday technologies, practices, and environments. In doing so, Participatory Design aims to address social justice and agency by including diverse actors in the collective shaping of alternative futures. Participatory Design embraces a diverse collection of principles and practices aimed at making technologies, environments, organisations and institutions more responsive to human and planetary needs. In this volume, a multidisciplinary and international group of highly experienced and recognised experts present an authoritative review of the contemporary field and discuss the diverse opportunities and challenges that arise from pivotal issues in Participatory Design, including scaling, collectives, sustainability and more-than-human, decolonisation, emerging technologies and AI, new approaches, methods and engagement beyond academia.

The handbook advances contemporary research, theory and practice and highlights case studies that demonstrate how Participatory Design can bring about game-changing shifts in diverse contexts. The volume is an invaluable resource for students, researchers, scholars, and professionals who seek to utilise Participatory Design research and practice to enrich, support and transform complex contemporary conditions towards inclusive, sustainable and transitional futures.

Rachel Charlotte Smith is Associate Professor of Human-Centred Design at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research focuses on everyday digital transformations and sustainable technology futures through Participatory Design and Design Anthropology. She co-chaired PDC 2016 in Denmark and is Chair of the PDC Advisory Board 2020–2024.

Daria Loi is Chief Experience Officer at Astral and Founder at Imperfecta, USA. Her work combines design strategy and participatory research with the goal of enriching people’s everyday lives. She was Conference Co-Chair for PDC 2010 in Australia, Co-Chair of the PDC Advisory Board 2020–2022, and Beyond Academia Chair for every PDC since 2014.

Heike Winschiers-Theophilus is Professor in Software Engineering at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, Namibia, and UNESCO Chair in Digital Technology Design with Indigenous People. Collaborating with local communities, she conceptualised community-based co-design, grounded in principles of Participatory Design, Afrocentricity and Ubuntu. She co-chaired PDC 2014 in Namibia and PDC 2024 in Malaysia.

Liesbeth Huybrechts is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Architecture and Arts at the University of Hasselt, Belgium. Based on Participatory Design, Design Anthropology and spatial transformation processes, her research applies design and politics for/with participatory exchanges between human and material/natural environments. She co-chaired PDC 2018 in Belgium and is Co-Chair of the PDC Advisory Board 2022–2025.

Jesper Simonsen is Professor of Participatory Design at Roskilde University, Denmark. He has over 30 years of experience conducting participatory design projects and was Programme Chair of PDC 2008, General Chair of PDC 2012, and Chair of the PDC Advisory Board 2014–2019. His books include The Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design (2013).