Decolonizing design for cultural heritage and museums within a systemic change framework: discussing the participatory paradigm

In today’s world, despite awareness of the need for systemic change and calls for a pluriverse, with a post-human or – better – more-than-human and planet-centric perspective (Forlano, 2017; Escobar, 2018; Tironi et al., 2024), design still often acts as a structure of authority and power. It operates as an exogenous entity on complex systems, somehow disregarding the value of endogenous processes. In the Cultural heritage domain (hereafter CH), already the subject of a profound discussion and transformation (Borowieki, Forbes and Fresa, 2016) and at the crossroads of the twin transition (JPI Cultural Heritage and JPI Climate, 2022), and therefore regardedas an ecosystem with great cultural complexity (Dameri and Demar-tini, 2020), the inconsistency of this pretentious design approach emerges clearly. The CH system is the one that magnifies the tremendous urgency of decolonizing its processes (Tolia-Kelly and Raymond, 2020) possi-bly with a design approach (Tunstall, 2023; Tironi et al., 2024) to really address a pluriverse development. In any case, few heritage studies fully succeed in truly decolonizing (Brulon Soares, Chagas, Mellado González and Weil, 2022), while others still refer to a post-colonial perspective that merely «enables new voices» (Turunen, 2020). This study therefore proposes a critical discussion of participatory design (PD) processes in CH based on literature review, in order to evaluate and assess the effectiveness and impact of such practices.The essay starts with a brief problematization of the concepts of participation in design and in CH, and the concept of decolonizing design. Next it moves into discussion of the selected research articles within mainstream design journals, the methodology used for selec-tion and analysis, and then the results.