For 25 years the Participatory Design Conference (PDC) has been concerned with the understanding and development of Participatory Design in theory and practice. The main contribution of this paper is an informed understanding of how the participatory design tradition formed the early PDC community and how the PDC community's understanding of PD developed during the 90s. The paper presents an inquiry into the recurrent, fundamental aspects of participatory design, namely: politics, context, product, people, and method. Using politics as our point of departure the paper elucidates how the core aspects were shaped and developed during the first decade of PDC. The paper thereby establishes a basis for advancing how interaction design researchers position and discuss their research in relation to the roots of participatory design at PDC. In the papers concluding remarks we suggest how contemporary researchers can build on, challenge, and fill in gaps in the PDC community's understanding of PD.