And then if you ask, 'Well, when did participatory design emerge?' You'll hear answers like, 'Well, in the 1970s, I think with collaborative design in Scandinavia.' Some people might say, Okay, 1960 with Karl Linn, the father of Participatory Architecture', or Jane Jacobs with a wonderful book that critiqued the centralized version of urban planning that planted the seeds for participatory urban planning. Some people might even say, Well, you could go into the 1940s with the participatory action research models from Europe,
but notice whether forties, sixties or seventies, the era, all three of those eras on the right are right on top of each other because we're saying that for 300,000 years there has been no participatory design. Really? What if design is just in its simplest form, some kind of time of taking in information,
some time of coming up with an idea or multiple ideas, and then some time where you implement those ideas or test them, and that when you do that in community, it's participatory design. Well, if that's the case, I'm willing to bet that there are many, many more examples of participatory design before the 1940. We could go to ancient Mesopotamia, where civilization was booming and burgeoning, and they were dealing with the problem of how do we grow enough food for all these people?
And we keep increasing the numbers. And when it rains too much, the crops are ruined. And when it doesn't rain enough, the crops are ruined. So they built these large storage basins and then they dug these things called canals that connected these large storage basins of water to each of the farms. And they built up the banks and sides of the river. But even if you go back to 3000 years ago with the actual first codification of the Ayurvedic or the Siddha traditional systems of medicine, they were only encoding folk medicine which had been practiced for thousands of years
before that. So when we come back and we look at this timeline that we had, we realize, well, wait a minute, participatory design has been happening the entire time. There is no separate start of participatory design, different from the start of communities. In fact, when we look at the animals who also practice design or even when we look at the hidden life of trees, where trees below ground are locking roots and sending signals through mycelia warning of impending danger using this particular design in order to grow greater resilience.
This even goes beyond Homo sapiens. We could even go before Homo sapiens 2.6 million years ago. The first sharpened stones. If you look on the left, people would take these rocks and just hit it and create these sharpened stones. And that eventually evolved to stone hand axes in about 1.6 million years ago. And then what we call knapping tools, about 400 to 200,000 years ago. And eventually on the right, what you see there are cutting blades that emerged around 80000 to 40000 years ago,
but it didn't stop there. They then went on to sharp micro blades around 11 to 17,000 years ago. And then eventually 12,000 years ago we have the first axes and chisels and all of this, which you might say is 'OK, it's experimentation' is a type of research. They're trying things and see if they can make this tool better to do what they needed to do. And when we look at the history of participatory research, you realize: Wait a minute, there is no separate beginning of participatory research that is separate from the beginning of communities;
communities have always been doing this, and even before the emergence of Homo sapiens. We can be encouraged by the words of research justice, which says there are different types of knowledge. And I think one of the problems and the reasons that we think, 'Oh, participatory research, participatory design is new' is because we don't understand all the different types of knowledge that exist besides mainstream institutional knowledge or third-person knowing we have lived experiential knowledge, we have cultural knowledge, spiritual knowledge and research justice says all of these knowledges are equal.
And when we begin to understand the plethora, the diversity of knowledge it actually begins to transform our definition of research from investigation to a pluriverse of definitions. And the purpose of research to being, to establish a fact or to reach a conclusion, then becomes transformed to a *pluriverse* of purposes.