Collaboratively articulating "urban" participatory design?!

Abstract

Increasingly many Participatory Design (PD) researchers and practitioners engage in and public contexts, which surely are about participation and democracy, but not necessarily with a main focus on technology development. These engagements are often a part of dealing with complex societal challenges such as sustainability. Today, many different but partly overlapping denominations are used to capture these participatory practices such as: community-based PD, emerging publics, design for sharing, commons and commoning, transition and transformation design, public and social innovation, PD and living labs, etc. As a group of PD researchers, the Boundary Brigade, we have engaged in this kind of work for soon a decade. At this dialogue-based hands-on workshop, we invite others with similar interests in further articulating: (1) what characterizes applying a PD approach in and public contexts, (2) how to understand urban + PD, (3) lastly, whether it is fruitful to articulate, as a more overarching concept, the (sub)domain of Urban Participatory Design. Practically we will do this through collaborative mappings with cut-ups of personal positions, discussions and by co-producing arguments as video stories.