MPA Series: Design Isn’t Neutral — Let’s Stop Pretending
Why the way we design public services needs to change — and why culture, trust, and history matter more than any workshop.
When “participation” starts to feel performative
During one of my seminars at UCL, I was talking with a classmate from Singapore about the design methods we were learning — co-creation, participatory workshops, design justice, journey mapping, user narratives. The whole modern toolbox. At one point he laughed and said something that stuck with me:
“In Asia, governments don’t gather 40 people to talk about how to fix a problem. We just get shit done.”
It was blunt, maybe even provocative. But it tapped into something I had been feeling quietly for weeks.
So much of “participatory design,” as it’s taught in Western institutions, feels like it was built on an entirely different socio-political soil — one shaped by low trust in authority, a cultural expectation of adversarial civic engagement, and an insistence that every voice must be micro-consulted before anything moves an inch.
But not every society is built that way.
And not every community wants design to look like that.
This blog post comes from a paper I wrote for a class called Transformation by Design, where I explored what happens when we export these Western-rooted design methods into places with very different histories, cultures, trust dynamics, and political realities — especially post-conflict regions.
And the truth is: the design process can help. Deeply. But it also has limits. And blind spots. And colonial baggage we don’t talk about enough.
Design wasn’t born neutral
One thing this course pushed me to confront is that design — even the feel-good, human-centered, participatory kind — isn’t culturally neutral.
Modern design methods grew from Western philosophical traditions. They carry assumptions about:
individualism
rights-based participation
democratic checks and balances
the need to “challenge authority”
transparency and adversarial civic space
These assumptions make sense in Scandinavia or North America, where participatory design was born — places shaped by citizen movements demanding accountability, transparency, and a voice in planning decisions.
But when you transplant that model into other contexts, something breaks.
In many parts of Asia, the Middle East, and conflict-affected regions, participation doesn’t look like 20 people in a room sticking Post-it notes on a wall. It looks like:
elders mediating community decisions
religious authorities holding cultural legitimacy
trust built through loyalty, not process
discussions happening behind the scenes, not in open confrontation
These aren’t imperfections. They’re different social architectures.
But when Western design is exported, these local logics are often dismissed as “barriers,” “informality,” or “lack of civic engagement.”
In reality, they’re long-standing systems of collective decision-making.
The design world’s blind spot: Trust works differently everywhere
One of the most revealing parts of my research was comparing how trust shapes participation across cultures.
In Western contexts, trust in government tends to be medium to low — participation exists partly to check the power of the state. Public consultations are adversarial by design.
In many Middle Eastern or Asian contexts, trust in authority (local, religious, familial) can be much higher. Participation is often mediated through respected intermediaries, not mass deliberation. People don’t want to challenge authorities publicly — not because they’re passive, but because that’s not how their societies negotiate power, harmony, or conflict.
When we ignore this, design becomes awkward. Sometimes even extractive.
Agirre Lehendakaria Center: A glimpse of design done differently
One model that fascinated me was the Agirre Lehendakaria Center (ALC), a social innovation lab from the Basque Country — a region with its own history of trauma, conflict, and rebuilding.
Their method, works through narratives, community listening, systems mapping, and sense-making, not just workshops or sticky notes.
Source: Agirre Lehendakaria Center:
What struck me was how ALC tries to uncover:
what people say publicly
what people feel but don’t say
the hidden cultural meta-narratives that shape behaviour
the unspoken logic inside communities
It’s slow, intensive, iterative, and deeply relational.
But even this model — innovative as it is — carries Western design DNA.
Scaling it requires highly trained facilitators, resource-heavy engagement, and assumptions about who gets to facilitate and who becomes “the data.” It can unintentionally place designers back into the “expert” role, even when the process is meant to democratize power.
So the question becomes:
How do we design with people in ways that honour their culture, trauma, and trust — without imposing our frameworks on them?
Design in the MENA region: More complex than we think
Through the literature and historical analysis, I learned something important: the MENA region has always had its own design traditions.
Organic neighbourhoods, community-governed spaces, religious endowments (waqf), shared courts (qadi), local guilds, and communal decision-making were once the backbone of Islamic urbanism.
People weren’t “included” through workshops.
They were included because they were the system.
Colonialism disrupted that.
Modernization layered Western institutions on top of local social fabrics.
The result today is a hybrid, sometimes incoherent mix of the two.
So when we import Western design paradigms — even ones that claim to be inclusive — we need to ask:
Whose worldview shaped this process?
Whose knowledge is being privileged?
Who gets to speak?
Who can afford not to speak?
Who feels safe enough to speak at all?
Design is never just design.
It’s power. It’s history. It’s culture.
Why this matters even more in post-conflict settings
Conflict changes everything: trust, trauma, community dynamics, cognitive load, expectations.
In the paper I outlined challenges that make traditional participatory design almost impossible in these environments:
People are grieving.
Trust is fractured.
Speaking up may feel unsafe.
Data is outdated or dangerous to collect.
Community fatigue is real.
There are urgent material needs long before “co-creation” can begin.
Design cannot pretend to be neutral here. It must be healing-centered, trauma-informed, and culturally literate.
And sometimes, that means slowing down instead of pushing the designer’s agenda.
So… is design the problem or the solution?
Both.
Design has opened doors for people long shut out of the conversation.
It has given language, structure, and visibility to marginalized voices.
It has helped communities articulate needs that institutions ignored for decades.
But design can also reproduce hierarchies.
It can become extraction dressed up as empowerment.
It can impose Western norms on societies that operate through different logics.
It can treat communities as “participants” only after designers have already framed the question.
And that’s where the discomfort — and the potential — lives.
A more honest way forward
If there’s one thing this class taught me, it’s that decolonizing design isn’t a slogan. It’s a practice of humility.
It means:
Letting local cultural institutions lead
Shifting from “experts on top” to “designers on tap”
Allowing uncertainty, iteration, and slowness
Recognizing that trauma changes what participation looks like
Accepting that sometimes the community already has the system — we’re just not trained to see it
It means remembering that design isn’t about sticky notes or frameworks.
It’s about people.
People with histories, identities, politics, and pain.
A few questions to leave with you
Instead of a neat answer, I want to offer a few questions — the same ones I’m still wrestling with:
Who gets to define what “good design” looks like?
What parts of a design process are genuinely inclusive, and what parts simply feel that way?
When does “participation” empower — and when does it exhaust?
How do we design in ways that don’t overwrite the cultures we claim to serve?
And what might happen if we stopped treating communities as inputs, and started seeing them as co-authors?
If nothing else, I hope this piece nudges you to look at “design” differently — not as a shiny set of tools, but as a cultural and political act with real consequences.
When done thoughtfully, design can heal.
When done carelessly, it can wound.
The work is figuring out the difference.
