Let's Make a Community [of Practice]: Using Community-Based Participatory Design to Support Interdependence
This paper’s strongest contribution is not a new artifact but a reframing of dementia participatory design as community formation. By reading CBPD through Wenger’s Communities of Practice, it shows participants as active agents shaping inclusion for themselves and others, while also exposing how community boundaries and marginalisation structure who can participate at all.
Video Figure
Axes Lens
Rare contribution shape, typical evidence profile. The point here is not a score. It is to show what kind of claim the paper makes, and whether the evidence pattern is unusual or baseline in this 268 -review set.
Contribution shape
- Knowledge form
- generative knowledge typical · 35/268
- Novelty type
- theory typical · 15/268
- Abstraction level
- practice typical · 85/268
- Generalization target
- user population typical · 75/268
- Validation mode
- qualitative study typical · 63/268
Evidence profile
- Evidence strength
- strong typical · 158/268
- Claim alignment
- strong typical · 231/268
- Overclaim risk
- medium typical · 210/268
Review Summary
This is a strong CHI paper because it uses a familiar participatory design setting to make a sharper theoretical point about what design processes are doing socially. Rather than treating workshops only as a means to elicit requirements or generate concepts, the authors argue that the workshops themselves can become a temporary community of practice. That move matters in dementia HCI, where work can still slip into framing people living with dementia as recipients of support rather than contributors to collective action. The paper instead foregrounds engagement, alignment, and imagination as observable modes through which participants create meaning, support one another, and articulate more inclusive futures. The contribution is therefore partly descriptive and partly generative: it explains what happened in these workshops and offers a roadmap for designing technologies and processes that better support person-to-person interdependence. The evidence base is qualitative and appropriately scoped: five exploratory workshops in community settings, with analysis focused on the process rather than on downstream technology outcomes. The claims are persuasive because they stay close to participant behaviour and to the authors’ interpretive lens. Just as important, the paper includes real limitations that should temper generalization. The Communities of Practice framing was retrospective, so the study does not show what would happen if workshops were intentionally designed around CoP principles from the outset. And the participant pool was predominantly white, affluent, and in early stages of dementia, which means the account of non-participation is incomplete precisely where structural exclusion may be strongest. Even with those limits, the paper advances the field by connecting dementia HCI, interdependence, and participatory design in a way that is theoretically coherent and practically useful.
What Changed
Canon before
Prior dementia-related HCI work tended to treat people living with dementia as passive recipients of help or focused on designing technology solely for isolated individuals, missing the importance of existing community networks and interpersonal interdependencies that affect technology use and design success.
Departure from common sense
Contrary to the assumption that people living with dementia are passive or limited in agency and community participation, this paper shows that participants actively engage, align, and imagine new possibilities, forming a community of practice and demonstrating significant social agency in co-design processes.
Actual novelty
The paper applies Wenger’s Communities of Practice framework to analyze community-based participatory design workshops with people living with dementia and their carers, revealing how such workshops form a community of practice that supports social agency and inclusion. It integrates interdependence theory with community participation modes to offer a theory-informed roadmap for designing technologies that foster positive social interdependence and inclusion, advancing understanding of participation and non-participation in dementia-related technology design.
Evidence
The paper is grounded in qualitative evidence from five exploratory CBPD workshops in publicly accessible spaces in a mid-sized UK city, interpreted through Wenger’s Communities of Practice lens. The strongest support is for claims about participant agency, temporary community formation, and design implications around interdependence and inclusion. The paper also clearly states important limits: the CoP framing was applied retrospectively rather than built into the workshop design, and the participant pool was predominantly white, affluent, and early-stage dementia, constraining transfer.
“This paper explored how Community-Based Participatory Design (CBPD) workshops with people living with dementia, their carers, and program coordinators can create a community of practice. By analysing our design workshops through Wenger’s Community of Practice Framework, we have demonstrated that participants naturally enact the three Modes of Belonging — engagement, alignment, and imagination”
actual novelty · 7 Conclusion · confidence 0.95
“ By analysing our design workshops through Wenger’s Community of Practice Framework, we have demonstrated that participants naturally enact the three Modes of Belonging — engagement, alignment, and imagination. Our findings highlight how our participants worked to create inclusive experiences for themselves and others, rather than acting as passive recipients of support”
departure from common sense · 7 Conclusion · confidence 0.97
“Our use of Wenger’s Community of Practice (CoP) framework in this project was analytical and retrospective, not proactive. While we observed that our community-based participatory design workshops developed into a Community of Practice (CoP), our procedures were not explicitly designed using Wenger’s CoP framework. This sugge”
limitation · 6 Limitations and Future Work · confidence 0.99
“This paper focuses on the first phase of a year-long community-based participatory design research. The first phase included five, two-part exploratory workshops conducted in different publicly accessible spaces around a mid-sized UK city”
validation scope · 3 Method · confidence 0.94
Limits
Method limits
The authors explicitly note that Wenger’s Community of Practice framework was used analytically and retrospectively rather than proactively shaping the workshop procedures, which limits stronger claims that the design process intentionally instantiated CoP mechanisms.
Deployment limits
The evidence comes from five exploratory workshops in specific UK community settings rather than from deployed technologies in sustained real-world use, so downstream claims about technology effectiveness or broader community transformation remain provisional.
Boundary conditions
Findings are most applicable to dementia-related participatory design contexts with existing community ties and support infrastructures. Transfer is limited by the sample skew toward predominantly white, affluent participants in early stages of dementia and by contextual barriers such as transportation, resources, and pandemic effects.
Position in field
This paper extends dementia HCI by shifting attention from individual assistive support toward community participation, interdependence, and the social conditions of inclusion. Its main contribution is a theory-led interpretation of CBPD as a temporary community of practice that can reveal both participant agency and the boundaries that produce non-participation.