Participatory Design of Space (original) (raw)

Participatory Methods in the Development of Public Space: Case Studies Review

AESOP Annual Congress 2019

Urban Design and Planning worldwide have long been criticized for their lack of meaningful public consultation and participation in the process of shaping our built environment. Currently, the existing practices of consultation and participation are within the confines of council meetings, complex form filling and survey reports that often carry little weight towards the decisions made by the planning authorities; the latter are increasingly seeking for ways to encourage meaningful public participation in urban development decisions. This paper presents a systematic literature review on sustainable urban governance vis-a-vis participatory planning, in an effort to consolidate, evaluate and critique the various approaches on involving the public in decision-making process in relation to urban form in general and public space in particular. The literature/case studies presented are referenced across a scale of degrees of participation, referring to a range of influence that participants have in the decision-making. In its two extremes it can be viewed as no participation, where designers make assumptions of users’ needs and requirements, and full participation, based on user-defined criteria of quality. The evaluation of many participatory research practices is somewhere in between the two extremes, focusing more on design with the users. However, the given theoretical process, might provide an insufficient degree of realism that designers need to cope with, due to time and budget constraints. If it is to remain grounded to the practice of design, literature should be able to cope with barriers, and seek understanding beyond its conceptual approaches.

The Dilemma Of Education In Participatory Design: The Marketplace Value Vs. Community Value

2004 Annual Conference Proceedings

The concept of "participatory planning/design" has gradually become one of the main themes in professional design and social science. However, because behavioral patterns in space design are closely related to the values of the designers concerned, the pursuit and construction of a good place is a basic and normative proposition in the proceeding of planning and design. This paper explores the dilemma of education in participatory design and reveals the contradiction between marketplace values and community values in practice. Also, this paper utilizes the production possibility curve and the choice theory of demand side to analyze the concept, value judgment, decision-making, and constraints of planning/design behavior.

Participatory Design: A Historical Perspective

2021

Participatory design is an attitude about a force for change in the creation and management of environments for people. Its strength lies in being a movement that cuts across traditional professional boundaries and cultures. Its roots lie in the ideals of a participatory democracy where collective decision-making is highly decentralized throughout all sectors of society, so that all individuals learn participatory skills and can effectively participate in various ways in the making of all decisions that affect them. Increasingly complex decision-making processes require a more informed citizenry that has considered the evidence on the issue, discussed potential decision options and arrived at a mutually agreed upon decision (Abelson et al, 2003).Today participatory design processes are being applied to urban design, planning, and geography as well as to the fields of industrial and information technology. Research findings suggest that positive outcomes are associated with solutions...

Msc. Thesis: Design For Public Spaces; Transdisciplinary Design Projects In Collaboration With Local Governments

This study starts from the hypothesis that besides social and economic factors, the public should have right to participate in the designing process of products for public spaces, as they are the main users of these products. In Turkey, interdisciplinary design services for the public space are becoming widespread and innovative units are being formed in accordance with this development. However, it is important to involve relevant discourses of this progressive understanding of design for public space, within the legally binding design standards, supervisory institutions and bureaucratic culture. In this respect, the main purpose of this study is to identify and analyze the current positive developments and defective facilities of the active mechanisms of decision-making in this field, from the perspective of designers. To identify the stakeholders who run these mechanisms, their methods and also to reveal the operations of relevant existing institutions; are some propounded implications of this study. Considering the participatory democratic culture in cities, I discuss the position of the state and other actors as service providers for public space, their ways of operation and the effectiveness of designers in decision-making processes. With this purpose in mind, I have interviewed some of the designers who take part in various processes of different design projects developed for the public space in collaboration with local governments. In this context, design services for public spaces are associated with the theoretical arguments based on personal experiences of designers. Due to their roles in various stages of the design system developed for public space, the designers I have interviewed are exemplary of the positions through which designers may get involved in this system. By referring to the personal assessments of the designers and evaluating subsidiary actors and various working models suggested by interviewees, this study discusses (1) the dominant design vision operating in bureaucratic processes depending upon the administrator and his/her profession, (2) the positioning of the designer as the design advisor in the current system, (3) the projects and operations regarding public participation, (4) the working forms of collaborative institutions in the current system, (5) the effect of tendering regulations and of the development and production methods of projects on their realization. Key Words: Design for Public Space, Design Participation, Transdisciplinary Design

Interdisciplinarity in Public Space Participative Projects

2015

Because Urban Design is a territory of integrative synthesis, the “overall view” that it requires comes through the collaboration of various sources of knowledge, some through professional and others through non-professional knowledge of users. The representation of actors involved in design (be them other professionals, urban deciders or users) is a part of research and teaching culture for several reasons namely because social and cultural interaction in the context of Urban Design management requires several capacities. CRPOLIS, an research interdisciplinary center on urban studies in Barcelona University is linked to Urban Design teaching at master’s degree level and supports an interdisciplinary research program also at PhD level in collaboration with other centers, in Spain and Portugal (such as CESUR-IST) where some cases of real “hands on” processes are developed. The role of interdisciplinarity in collaborative knowledge is relevant in gathering and interacting in three maj...

Participatory Design

Journal of Design, Planning and Aesthetics Research

Participatory design is the involvement of people in the creation and management of their built and natural environments. Its strengths are that it cuts across traditional professional boundaries and cultures. The activity of participatory design is based on the principle that the built and natural environments work better if citizens are active and involved in its creation and management instead of being treated as passive consumers. The main purposes of participation are to involve citizens in planning and design decision-making processes and, as a result increase their trust and confidence in organizations, making it more likely that they will work within established systems when seeking solutions to problems; to provide citizens with a voice in planning, design and decision-making in order to improve plans, decisions, service delivery, and overall quality of the environment; and to promote a sense of community by bringing people together who share common goals. A wide range of t...

The significance of early stages in participatory design for social sustainability

The source literature devoted to participatory design concentrates very often on studying preferences in feeling architecture, as the culmination and a really key case is the post-occupancy evaluation (POE). The participation of respondents, users in managing the architectural environment is established especially in the field of these elements, where creation takes place with the use of an easy means of communication – a drawing, graphics and also those, which are oriented towards picking out the subjective component of assessment, for which the objectification process is not so important. Such study recognizes individual preferences and it enables one to draw conclusions, relatively non-distant from social expectations, using statistics rules. In such constructed action, the effectiveness of participation is strongly conditioned on the range of ability to involve a big group of potential recipients of architectural design. In investigations carried out for over 50 years of functioning of the social participation as the system of supporting the effectiveness of architectural design, oriented towards supporting local communities, the other proposals also appear, widening the range of possible participation. However, most of these actions take place far away outside the borders of Poland and therefore the mechanisms used in them are difficult to inculcate in the local area. In the paper the significance of early stages of the Method Architektura dla Lokalnej Społeczności (AdLS) – Architecture for the Local Society is presented, which makes an attempt at improving social participation through constructing mechanisms of objectifying opinions of architecture recipients, involving them in constructing the language of dialogue, the system of multi-criteria assessment, selection of criteria and more conscious working within the confines of designing as well as building long-term social relations with simultaneously retaining rules

Rethinking Leftover Spaces with the New Digitalized Participatory Design Method

9th International Conference on New Trends in Architecture and Interior Design , 2023

Leftover spaces are urban areas that have not been designed or have lost their current function and fallen into disuse. The primary condition for reevaluating these areas is to define their use cycle, both physically and socially. The actors who best define these urban leftover areas are the users, rather than the designers or managers. In this context, user participation, as a form of democratic action, is now important in terms of determining the value of these spaces and creating a roadmap for regeneration. However, in today’s fast-changing metropolitan cities, traditional user participation methods remain limited and inefficient in terms of the space-time relationship. This study questions user participation in defining and reevaluating urban leftover spaces using digital methods, in a comparative manner with traditional methods. The main purpose is to propose a new potential contribution to the weaknesses of the traditional method by rethinking these processes through a digital mappingbased model. The method of the study consists of three stages. In the first step, the traditional processes of the user participatory design approach were examined through literature analysis, and an organizational schema was determined. In the second step, the analysis methods of the literature studies using the ARCGIS program, which is a digital geographic mapping system, were explored. The possible conflicts of this digital method with the traditional schema determined in the user-participatory design organization were examined. In the last step, the benefits and drawbacks of traditional and digital methods were revealed through a comparative SWOT analysis. The important conclusions of the study evaluate the role of urban users and the contribution of the role-playing method in the reevaluation of leftover spaces. In summary, this new digitalized model provides faster feedback on instant urban changes, contributes to social sustainability by creating an equal and transparent participatory behavior policy, increases the potential for these areas to be noticed and visible, and contributes to urban memory by creating a multi-layered archive for the changing space-time-subject relationship. On the other hand, there are potential threats to this new digital method, including the loss of an eye-level scale when looking at the area, rapid consumption, and the destruction of the sense of belonging to the area by involving non-local users in the design process. These are considered the most significant threats.

Shaping Public Space, in Public, with the Public: Co-Drawing the Continuous Campus

Less Talk More Action, 2019

Protocols of public space production have been evolving in recent years, with the public no longer solely the end user of an architect-designed space. The form of public space as the domain of architects is increasingly replaced by a need to structure a process of formation – a forum – that positions architects as collaborators with the public, designing sites, artifacts, and protocols for citizen engagement. This paper puts forward an engaged methodology for public space formation that operates in public and with the public, and employs collaborative drawing.