Logics of Collaboration: An Ethnography of Engineering Co-design in the Brazilian Amazon

Participatory design approaches such as co-design are promoted as ways to increase the likelihood that engineered products are economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable by incorporating stakeholders into decision-making processes. However, executing collaborative design practices that incorporate the variety of stakeholders represents an enormous challenge. In this paper we examine these realities as experienced by a co-design team comprised of design engineers from a foreign country who are engaged with local stakeholders to develop a product for a community in the Brazilian Amazon. Based on more than a year of ethnographic research, we identify three types of perspectives or institutional logics operating in this setting—engineering, modernization, and traditional—which interact to constrain and enable the co-design process. We find that these logics can undermine co-design because the design team is better equipped to respond to stakeholders who express modernization logics rather than traditional ones. We conclude that while co-design can be truly collaborative in development projects, other times it may lead to the appearance that the design process is collaborative when it may in fact mask the marginalization of certain stakeholder voices.