Pragmatism versus urgency: how participatory design negotiates climate concerns in school energy projects

Participatory design (PD) is often applied to engage with big issues, such as climate change mitigation. However, there is an equal concern that PD projects tend to gravitate towards small, immediate, and technologically solvable outcomes. Drawing on a sociomaterial entanglement lens, we analyse six school-based PD projects involving hands-on renewable energy technology engagement to understand how this gravitation towards practical doability can marginalise big issues in PD and how it may result not only from human intentions but also from sociomaterial entanglements. We observe that big issues are not an external aim but rather constituents that are inseparably entangled with school structures, pedagogical norms, ethical conventions, and specific tools. These sociomaterial entanglements configure how participation takes form and, in turn, how energy and climate issues are framed and reframed within PD. Furthermore, aligning with emerging discussions on the asymmetrical nature of sociomaterial entanglement, this perspective sensitises us to see how the co-design process, while entangling with certain elements, can also unintentionally disentangle and marginalise others, including climate concerns. Therefore, we argue that PD for complex social and environmental issues must move beyond human-centric methods and directly interrogate and disrupt the disentanglements that may occur within the sociomaterial assemblage.