Participatory video and design: examples from the Bespoke project

As anthropologists work to enable the participation of “subjects” in the co-creation of ethnographic insight, participatory media has increasingly been used in order to creatively produce and disseminate experience. In this paper we draw on both design and anthropological literature to contextualise the experience of the Bespoke Project, a community-centred design project in the UK. As part of Bespoke, community members in two disadvantaged areas were asked to contribute videos about life in the area, which was in turn viewed by a design team who used the material for contextual information and inspiration to create bespoke designs. Here, we consider the contribution that participatory video can make to the process of design ethnography, and the challenges and benefits of this methodology.