Participatory Design Theory: Using Technology and Social Media to Foster Civic Engagement (Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design)

In recent years, many countries all over Europe have witnessed a demand for a more direct form of democracy, ranging from improved clarity of information to being directly involved in decision-making procedures. Increasingly, governments are putting citizen participation at the centre of their policy objectives, striving for more transparency, to engage and empower local individuals and communities to collaborate on public projects and to encourage self-organization. This book explores the role of participatory design in keeping these participatory processes public. It addresses four specific lines of enquiry: how can the use and/or development of technologies and social media help to diversify, to coproduce, to interrupt and to document democratic design experiments? Aimed at researchers and academics in the fields of urban planning and participatory design, this book includes contributions from a range of experts across Europe including the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Spain, France, Romania, Hungary and Finland. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 Notes on contributors 10 Introduction 16 PART I To diversify 28 1 Valuating narrative accounts in participatory planning processes: a case of co-creative storytelling in Antwerp, Belgium 30 2 Using a complex sound world for a participative dismantling and redefinition of the collective appropriation of industrial landscapes 43 3 Reflections on the counter-mapping of urban ‘arrival neighborhoods’ through Geoweb 2.0 in Brussels and Ghent 55 4 Data-driven design for civic participation: introducing digital methods for on-going civic engagement for design in public space 71 5 Design initiatives in public spaces: eight interpretative lenses 86 PART II To co-produce 102 6 Sharing authorship and measuring influence in architectural training in neighbourhood communities 104 7 Digitally networked action: developing self-organisation in ‘weak-tie’ residential communities through a ‘Facebook group’ 116 8 Communal garden and the liminal city 132 9 BIMBY: modeling, civic empowerment and the invention of a new profession 143 PART III To interrupt 158 10 Design, technology and social innovation: the serious game of TrafficO2 160 11 Daredevil or socializer? Exploring the relations between intrinsic motivation, game experience and player types in serious games with environmental narratives 172 12 Fabricăm: participatory urban interventions in a post-communist context 194 13 Rethinking the designer’s role in the collective re-imagination of societies: a necessary reinterpretation of design for social innovation 210 PART IV To document 226 14 Participation within and beyond museums with the help of digital technologies 228 15 (Challenges and opportunities of) documentation practices of self-organised urban initiatives 245 16 Documentation games: a comparison between three games to support participatory design teams to document their design process 262 Index 278 In recent years' many countries all over Europe have witnessed a demand for a more direct form of democracy, ranging from improved clarity of information to being directly involved in decision-making procedures. Increasingly, governments are putting citizen participation at the centre of their policy objectives, striving for more transparency, to engage and empower local individuals and communities to collaborate on public projects and to encourage self-organisation. This book explores the role of participatory design in keeping these participatory processes public. It addresses four specific lines of enquiry: how can the use and/or development of technologies and social media help to diversify, to coproduce, to interrupt and to document democratic design experiments. Aimed at researchers and academics in the fields of urban planning and participatory design, this book includes contributions from a range of experts across Europe including the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Spain, France, Romania, Hungary and Finland.