Participatory Design Experience Research Articles

End user engagement in refugee shelter design: Contextualising participatory process

Debate about participatory design (PD) has focussed considerably upon process. Factors such as facilitation skills and commitment to a participatory ethos have been highlighted as factors mediating stakeholder engagement. Discussion has been driven overwhelmingly by experience of PD in the global North with citizens who enjoy full rights. This article considers engagement with encamped refugees in the global South. Here context has a significant impact upon engagement. Drawing on a four-year research project concerning shelter design we discuss dimensions of context that bear particularly upon PD efforts. As we illustrate, despite contextual constraint, it is possible to produce valuable knowledge about design together with residents. Moreover, attention to context can help achieve a more nuanced approach to the evaluation of PD initiatives.

Experimenting with New Ways of Circular and Participatory Design: The Case Study of a Traditional Sicilian Architecture Transformed for Experiential Tourism

Circular economy, participatory design, and experiential tourism are the starting points for the “Il Pagliaru Novu” research project, whose aim is to redesign, in an innovative scope, a traditional Sicilian rural architecture called pagliaru. This paper aims to present such research, which experimented—in parallel—a circular design approach and a virtual participatory design experience to develop a microarchitecture for experiential tourism. We describe the method and design process behind the Pagliaru Novu, and the features—combining tradition and innovation—of such microarchitecture. The design, and especially the entire design process, highlights how a series of constraints related to the pandemic may turn into opportunities.

Vernacular Wisdom as a Path Towards Ecologically Sustainable Housing and Settlements: Participatory Design and Building to Rehabilitate Local Adobe Brick Constructions in El Salvador

Globalized cultures, imaginaries, and economies are often matched to the standardization of building approaches. However, solutions that are not tailored for a specific context tend to entail environmental, economic, and social issues. Throughout human history, vernacular wisdom has produced interesting low-energy and climate-responsive architectures all around the globe: These can be seen as interesting examples in an era of global warming and overall uncertainty; at the same time, they represent accessible sustainable solutions in deprived areas of the world as well as in wealthier areas. The experience of participatory design and building process is here presented, carried on in a rural area of El Salvador, Central America. A sanitary facility for a school is designed and realized after the collectively desired recovery and improvement of one of the fruits of local vernacular wisdom in building design, i.e., the adobe earth brick. Some potentials and limits of such experience as well as of the used technology are reviewed in the perspective of affordable and ecologically sustainable housing and settlements in the area.

Active Learning in Architectural Education: A Participatory Design Experience (PDE) in Colombia

AbstractContemporary architecture teaching in Colombia still resembles the traditional master–apprentice model, which is also common in many parts of the world. The model of regular curricular focus on classroom‐based modules where theory and practice are predominantly disengaged, leaving the students to make their connections. Students that learnt with these models face greater difficulties to apply knowledge, compared with students taught with active learning formats. It is argued that participatory design processes could be catalytic for change in this area, by empowering participants in the co‐creation of their socio‐spatial context. This article aims to contribute by suggesting a methodology for a Participatory Design Experience (PDE), which could be applied to transform a conventional teaching module into a student‐centred learning environment. The methodology was tested and refined through a case study, demonstrating its effectiveness in architectural education. The article describes it in detail in order to be replicated by educators in comparable scenarios.

La necesidad de herramientas para la co-creación del paisaje urbano

RESUMEN
 Con el objetivo de acercarse a una participación ciudadana oportuna, legible y medible, en el contexto del desarrollo del paisaje urbano en la ciudad latinoamericana, se desarrolla una herramienta para la extracción de información espacial desde la comunidad, a través de patrones de diseño aplicables a la obra urbana. Se sistematiza una experiencia de diseño participativo en la Región de Antofagasta —en el marco del Programa de Recuperación de Barrios del Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo—, demostrando la importancia de acercarse a un co-diseño del paisaje urbano a nivel de barrio, ciudad y territorio.

Infrastructuring Knowledge in Cultural Infrastructure

This paper discusses infrastructuring as an informal experience of Participatory Design in the context of museums. The authors describe “participation” as an embedded and stable parameter for looking at museums sustainability. Their standpoint is that museums develop and encourage knowledge through participative and interrelated relationships among various actors. Thus, the value of participation intersects the concept of infrastructuring, which implies the ongoing feature, the hybridity of networks and the complexity of the context, and consider together human and non-human. Describing visitors' participation in infrastructuring processes, the authors underline the unprofessional and unplanned stage of design process in order to stimulate new direction on designing museum exhibition and for planning the introduction of interactive technologies in the museum environment.

In pursuit of rigour and accountability in participatory design

The field of Participatory Design (PD) has greatly diversified and we see a broad spectrum of approaches and methodologies emerging. However, to foster its role in designing future interactive technologies, a discussion about accountability and rigour across this spectrum is needed. Rejecting the traditional, positivistic framework, we take inspiration from related fields such as Design Research and Action Research to develop interpretations of these concepts that are rooted in PD׳s own belief system. We argue that unlike in other fields, accountability and rigour are nuanced concepts that are delivered through debate, critique and reflection. A key prerequisite for having such debates is the availability of a language that allows designers, researchers and practitioners to construct solid arguments about the appropriateness of their stances, choices and judgements.To this end, we propose a “tool-to-think-with” that provides such a language by guiding designers, researchers and practitioners through a process of systematic reflection and critical analysis. The tool proposes four lenses to critically reflect on the nature of a PD effort: epistemology, values, stakeholders and outcomes. In a subsequent step, the coherence between the revealed features is analysed and shows whether they pull the project in the same direction or work against each other. Regardless of the flavour of PD, we argue that this coherence of features indicates the level of internal rigour of PD work and that the process of reflection and analysis provides the language to argue for it. We envision our tool to be useful at all stages of PD work: in the planning phase, as part of a reflective practice during the work, and as a means to construct knowledge and advance the field after the fact. We ground our theoretical discussions in a specific PD experience, the ECHOES project, to motivate the tool and to illustrate its workings.