From Participation as a Promise to Participation in Practice: What NewWorkTech Is Teaching Us About Research, Innovation and Inclusion
- Jul 2
- 10 min read
Author: Maija Hirvonen, Scientific Coordinator of NewWorkTech (Tampere University), with contributions from Paola Vulterini, NewWorkTech project partner (Italian Association of People with Down Syndrome – AIPD) and edited by Raia Mihaylova, NewWorkTech project partner (The European Platform for Rehabilitation – EPR)
In February 2026, I had the privilege of taking part in a seminar about participatory research at the University of Siegen, Germany. The seminar, "Participation as a Popular Promise," was organised by the specialised research area Transformations of the Popular (Transformationen des Populären), which explores versatile cultural, political and communicative phenomena that can be described as popular.
Profoundly inspired by the presentations and discussions with fellow scholars, I am writing this blog post with some take-home messages based on (self-)critical reflections about participatory research in, and beyond, the NewWorkTech project. The seminar offered an opportunity not only to consider broader theoretical debates but to also look in-depth at our own experiences of participation and innovation during the first year and a half of the project.
These reflections have also been enriched by conversations within our own consortium. As a Horizon Europe project, NewWorkTech brings together academic researchers, disability organisations, technology experts and other stakeholders with a shared ambition to make workplaces and technologies more inclusive, both for people with disabilities and the general workforce. During our first year together, we discovered that participation is not only something we seek to study with workers with disabilities and workplaces. It is also something we continually practice within the consortium itself, as partners with different forms of expertise learn how to work together.
This has not always been straightforward. Academic and non-academic partners often begin from different perspectives, use different professional languages and have different expectations of what participation should look like. Yet these differences have become an important source of learning. They have encouraged us to consider not only how people with disabilities (our main target group) participate in research, but also how academic and non-academic partners collaborate to produce knowledge that is both scientifically rigorous and socially meaningful.
The provocative title of the Siegen seminar "Participation as a Popular Promise" captures the essence of this debate. I would like to reflect on these discussions through the lens of the NewWorkTech project, focusing on aspects of participatory research that have become topical in our project. The narrative is structured around three questions:
Why do we conduct participatory research and innovation?
How do we plan to ensure meaningful participation?
Who are our participants?
These take-aways are not intended as definitive answers. Rather, they represent lessons we are continuing to learn as our project further develops.
The Why
We are witnessing a Participatory Turn in research and societal development in the western countries: different disciplines are conducting user-centered or societally relevant research, while social and political institutions seek greater legitimacy through democratic participation. These endeavors translate into approaches such as participatory research, citizen science and co-design, where people who are not traditionally regarded as experts on a given topic become active contributors.
One notable institutional context exerting the participatory approach are cross-national political systems, such as the European Union. As a Horizon Europe Research and Innovation action funded by the EU, NewWorkTech naturally aligns with this ambition, as well as with what is known as the “third mission” of modern-day universities: directing research efforts toward societally relevant topics. In NewWorkTech, we have a burning real-world challenge to tackle - to reduce the marginalisation of people with disabilities and to foster greater diversity in work and tech use and design.
Participation can occur as invited or invented. When invited, it is the institutionally or hierarchically higher actor that seeks to make “lower” actors participate (participation in object position). Invented participation, on the other hand, departs from the participants in a subject position.
Looking back on our first year, the NewWorkTech experience suggests that these two forms of participation are closely connected. Disability organisations and other non-academic partners were invited into the consortium from the proposal stage onwards. At the same time, they have actively shaped the project's thinking by raising questions about representation, collaboration and the respective roles of academic and non-academic partners. In this sense, participation has not only involved carrying out research together but also reflecting together on how that collaboration should take place.
At the seminar, Andreas Bischoff from Technical University Chemnitz presented both insights and criticism on the topic of participation as a promise. He argued that participation has become attractive because societies are facing crises of legitimacy, increasing pressures for innovation, and a declining trust in institutions. Last but not least, we are facing complex problems, such as inclusion of people with dis/abilities in all areas of society.
These institutional motivations are important. Nevertheless, I, for one, subscribe also to other kind of motivations for participatory research. Immersing ourselves into the “ordinary”, studying the everyday life of people, and together with them, like the “ethno” methods (ethnography, ethnomethodology) invite us to do, is a way of discovering new perspectives to scientific theories and methods, and a source for new research questions that would have remained hidden without the participants’ insider perspective.
During the project, our non-academic partners have reminded us that this exchange goes both ways. Practical experience does not simply enrich academic research; it also challenges researchers to explain concepts more clearly, to question assumptions and to remain open to the different forms of expertise that non-academic partners bring to participatory research, whether grounded in lived experience as people with disabilities themselves, professional experience gained through working alongside people with disabilities, employers and support professionals, or a combination of both. Equally, collaboration has enabled non-academic partners to engage with new theoretical perspectives that help frame and interpret their own experience and develop their expertise. In this sense, participation has become a process of mutual learning rather than a one-way transfer of knowledge.
This mutual learning has also reshaped our understanding of the role of non-academic partners within the project. They are not involved simply to support researchers in carrying out their work. Rather, they contribute a different but equally important form of expertise. Participatory research fulfils its promise not by privileging one type of knowledge over another, but by creating dialogue between theoretical, methodological, lived and practice-based expertise.
The Who
NewWorkTech has set out to produce relevant, actionable output for stakeholders, with stakeholders. Yet human social life, including the world of work, is a complex matter, and it is not easy to define who the (most) relevant actors are that should participate when we want to solve socio-technical and interactional problems that involve much more than one person using a device.
Our core participants are people with dis/abilities, which raises questions related to quality and quantity: How do we address the inter-categorial diversity of dis/ability (for example, the many facets of neurodiversity), and how many persons do we invite to participate, in which activities? What roles do they take: are they users of devices, co-researchers in analyses or, indeed, professionals who work? The choice of role has consequences to the interpretations and perspectives the participants take. Finally, do we invite them to participate as individuals or as representatives of “their” group or category? Categorisation always comes with a paradox: the person is simultaneously an individual while also sharing traits with others in many respects. During the analytical and collaborative processes, conflicts may emerge because expectations and goals diverge, and affective and cognitive work is high.
These questions also extend to representation. While the principle of "Nothing about us without us" rightly emphasises the participation of people with disabilities in decisions that affect their lives, it also reminds us that there is no single disability perspective. Experiences differ across disability groups and between individuals, making it essential to create opportunities for people with different disabilities - including people with intellectual disabilities - to contribute their own voices and expertise. Equally important is recognising that disability is only one dimension of a person's identity. In the context of NewWorkTech, this means recognising our participants not only as people with dis/abilities, but also as employees, professionals and experts in workplace practices, whose experiences of disability are one important part of, but not the entirety of, who they are.
We are also faced with the question of to what extent do our participants function as experts by experience, or even gatekeepers? This clarification doesn’t come without consequences. Importantly, the study of interaction by necessity involves at least two parties: therefore, NewWorkTech is also involving, as participants, the interaction partners of workers with dis/ability: assistants, colleagues, supervisors, job coaches, and so on. Interaction is a “tango for two” and for a successful accomplishment of interactive tasks, the two or more parties in a reciprocal action must be accounted for.
Participation involves various forms of capital: epistemic capital, social capital, symbolic capital… In regard to epistemic capital - capital about knowledge - we must ask: who is the expert? In our project, we clearly deal with different types of expertise.
Another insight from NewWorkTech has been that these different forms of expertise should not be understood as competing with one another. Rather, they are complementary. Taking our collaboration as an example, bringing together academic and non-academic partners has encouraged us to reflect not only on who participates in research, but also on how different forms of expertise can work together more effectively. These conversations have not always produced immediate answers, but they have strengthened our shared understanding that participation is built through dialogue, trust and a willingness to learn from one another.
The How
Now, what have we promised in NewWorkTech in terms of participatory action? And what lessons can we learn from the Siegen symposium on how to carry out meaningful participatory research?
Promise 1: Determining research questions, contexts and settings that are relevant to the participants’ experience at the workplace.
From the outset, building a consortium among academic and non-academic partners, who represent central project beneficiary stakeholder groups, was key to our foreseen work. Once completed, we started delivering our first promise. In the project planning phase, we determined our research questions and our study settings in continuous interaction with each other. Through our meetings and co-writing of the documents, our focus was on defining the approach we would undertake in order to gain knowledge of the participants’ experiences at their workplaces.
The consortium collaboration was then continued and expanded through:
monthly meetings among partners to plan the fieldwork and carried out extensive field work and data collection with participants at workplaces across Europe ( D1.1 and D2.1),
produced accessible fieldwork and co-design methods to ensure understanding with differently communicating and functioning participants when delivering information materials and asking for research permission,
organised the first co-creation workshops with different stakeholders concerning people and workers with disabilities as well as their representatives and co-actors in different types of organisations ( D4.1), and
produced the first analyses of new work tech competences for workplaces in co-authorship with experts by experience.
Being relevant in terms of participants’ experiences is, of course, an ongoing process. This is the common thread we aim to follow across the project’s life cycle, and beyond. Thus, applying a participatory approach did not stop in the proposal phase, nor is it restricted to the consortium’s internal functioning.
Overall, we should be alert of pseudoparticipation, that is, of using the label superficially, as reminded by Luisa Girnus in her talk on participatory democracy education at school during the Seminar. Participation, to succeed, requires time, space, and voice, and inviting people into research is not enough if they are not given genuine opportunities to influence its direction, or to interpret its results in a meaningful for them way.
Having entered the second year, NewWorkTech has the following promise to address:
Promise 2: Directing empirical focus at specific/relevant ways of interacting and using technology at the workplace.
We will be continuing the partner meetings in order to plan and execute participatory data analysis of our video, observation and interview datasets. Furthermore, we plan to organise joint data sessions with the participants who have given us their data. This type of participation should significantly advance scientific understanding of how the world of work is perceived and enacted with different functional abilities.
We will reflect about the findings from the empirical analyses in the light of theoretical and technological development. This means that the consortium partners continue co-developing the theory of technology (D3.1) and the co-design methodology that is essential in user-centered design of technology.
Up until now, the project has shown us that co-design depends not only on bringing different stakeholders into the same room, but also on creating an environment in which every participant feels that their expertise is recognised and valued. This requires researchers to remain open to practical knowledge, while non-academic partners engage with conceptual perspectives that may initially seem unfamiliar. Innovation emerges through this dialogue rather than from any single source of expertise.
Finally, we make two more promises regarding participation:
Promise 3: Identifying successes and problems in the usage of technology, as well as the elements that play a role in the success and problems.
Promise 4: Designing and evaluating possible solutions to remove barriers of successful usage of technology.
While this work is starting in the second year (2026), it will enter its peak in the third year (2027) as our work on the co-design of new work tech solutions intensifies. Having learnt profoundly about the disabled employees’ perspectives, we are widening the scope of our participatory activities to include stakeholders such as job coaches, personal assistants, colleagues, and many others who play a key role in the successes and challenges of accessible work. We will organise joint analysis sessions, workshops and a hackathon, aimed at producing actionable solutions. What is more, we will test the new work tech solutions designed with participants in real workplace settings and evaluate their functionality, again emphasising the participants’ perspective.
Following up on the seminar’s general outlook, NewWorkTech will do its best to avoid the common pitfalls. As discussed at the Siegen seminar, the risk is that participatory research only reproduces the border between science and society, enhances competing objectives, and produces solution-framed rhetorics, making things look good but leaving them ultimately as they were. For participatory research and innovation to success, asymmetrical power, knowledge and social relations of influence must be spelled out and discussed openly. After all, ideas and objectives may well remain controversial, but dialogue can always be supported.
In conclusion, participation undoubtedly holds great promise. It can strengthen democracy, improve the relevance of scientific research and create innovations that are more responsive to societal needs. Yet participation also asks difficult questions. Whose voices are heard? Whose expertise is recognised? How are decisions made? And how do we avoid participation becoming merely symbolic?
Our experience at NewWorkTech suggests that these questions do not have simple answers. Rather than viewing participation as something that can be fully achieved, we have come to understand it as a continuous process of reflection and adjustment. As researchers and non-academic partners, we have learned that meaningful collaboration requires us to explain our assumptions, listen carefully to one another and remain willing to adapt our ways of working.
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