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> affirmative action on behalf of marginalized
peoples becoming designers and taking the
lead on all projects

> advocating for wide participation in non-
project — based aspects of an organiza-
tion, such as the visions for the future that
the organization is working toward and
prepared to evaluate its work against

> advocating for participation in the profits
from design for all involved - from makers
and maintainers to users and disposers
(or recoverers)

This leads to a final important deficiency in

the current Stand up for Democracy project.

Many current anti-democratic discourses

take the form of scepticism toward experts.

Modern democratic governance has always
required a cohort of expert advisors. This is
why the modern university, as the arbiters
of those experts, is axial to democracy, even
though universities and the notion of expertise
is fundamentally undemocratic. The crisis of
democracy at the moment is not just a collapse
of faith in progress toward increasing democratic
enfranchisement, but a discrediting of progress
in expert knowledge production[6]. It is not a
coincidence that anti-democratic populists are

also anti-science in their reactions to urban elites.

As a fundamental part of the current challenge
to democracy, it is essential that defences of
democracy take this into account. As with other
problematic aspects of the pluralist version of
Standing up for Democracy, a loose version of
‘more democracy’ is actually the cause of the
problem rather than its solution. Those refuting
key scientific recommendations often do so by
appealing to their democratic rights to vote for
such scepticism, or to a disingenuous version
of their free speech right to articulate such
‘diverse’ denials.

Standing up for Democracy therefore demands
very carefully designed responses to the question
of experts in postmodern societies. There have
been concerted efforts to clarify what enhanced
participation in technoscientific expertise might

involve[7]. Deliberative Democracy forums for
technology assessment; the lay peer review
processes advocated as part of Post Normal
Science to evaluate scientific research directions,
Citizen Juries making delegated determinations
about acceptable risk. In each of these cases, the
processes have expanded the role of the citizen
from occasional election of political leaders to
more regular judgements about technoscientific
developments. The forms and formalities of
each are designed to democratize access to the
technical issues without empowering destructive
doubt about those technicians. To the contrary,
these exercises aim to enhance faith in the
work of experts by exposing their processes to
diversely lay scrutiny. Seeing how knowledge is
constructed is supposed not to destroy faith in
those domains but rather bolster it [8].

These initiatives lie very close to participatory
design research and prototyping processes at
their best. But there are still too few well-formed
bridges between Design Research and these ‘Post
Normal’ initiatives, ones that involve citizens in
well-informed decisions about what goods should
be produced, and which bad (risks of harmful
social and ecological impacts) communities are
prepared tolive with. ‘Standing up for Democracy’
must involve building, demonstrating and
promoting those bridges. This would mean not
just inviting participants to help with creating
a successful design, but creating mechanisms
by which participants can scrutinize the wider
strategy that any particular design is part of, and
evaluate the risks and future impacts that might
flow from widespread adoption of those designs.

If democracy is about equitable access to
decision-making about our shared futures, then a
democracy worth defending would regulate broad
inclusiveness in all design decisions. It should not
be possible to take a product to market before
delegated representatives had evaluated the
risks associated with that introduction, making
judgements about what that design will design.