PD as in Prefigurative Design: A ludic framework beyond participation

This exploratory paper challenges the prevailing ‘participatory orthodoxy’ in design and politics by questioning whether participation alone is enough to envision alternatives that resonate with collective aspirations. We argue for complementing emancipatory PD discourses with the idea of prefiguration and introduce 'ludic prefiguration' as a holistic and dynamic framework that interweaves elements of game design, cooperative play, and iterative collective playtesting to foster a deeper level of collaboration across the creative and political spectrums of design. This framework advocates for interactions that are not only playful but also ‘inefficient’ in their exploration, thereby redefining the influence of play on decision-making and questioning traditional perceptions of efficiency in design. At the heart of this approach is an activist commitment to radical imagination and meaningful inefficiency, seeking to reshape the contours of participation and pave new prefigurative pathways in democratising design and politics.