The psychological benefits of cooperative place-making: a mixed methods analyses of co-design workshops

Abstract

In a study aiming to establish the intrinsic value of involvement in a co-design, place-making workshop, we engaged participants in a vision-led development of the grounds and immediate parkland setting of a run-down Grade II listed Mansion House in South Liverpool. Two groups of volunteers engaged in 6 × 90-min co-design workshop sessions spaced equally over 6 weeks, forming part of a cross-over design that compared the intrinsic value and wellbeing benefits of shared reading to place-making. The sessions aimed to develop place-making confidence, place-appraisal skills and design-thinking in the participants and to propose aims, objectives and a vision that supported the ethos of the social enterprise that was developing the property. Data collected using post-it notes, limited voice recording and subsequent interview was qualitatively analysed and considered alongside quantitative analysis using standardised and bespoke realistic procedures. The findings suggest that the workshop activities supported changes to psychological and community wellbeing by enhancing both a sense of personal growth and a collective sense of place-related optimism. We therefore assert that the practice of co-design place-making has potential to develop mental and social capital by reconnecting people to place and communities to neighbourhoods.     

Matters of becoming,experimental zones for making museums public with social media

Making things public challenges existing matters of concern and, in design, may also be about changing them. This paper advances the concept of translation from early ANT literature and explores it in order to support co-designing for making things public. We elaborate on how translations may be understood as moves and transformations of practices and objects that require both time and learning. We discuss how translations may include the emerging, situated, fluid, enacted, experiential and the material, and suggest co-design to rethink translation as a temporal process of learning and ‘becoming’. Our aim is to demonstrate a mutual theoretical influence between ANT and co-design. Our conceptual reflection is based on a museum design case where museum staff and the authors explore new communicational modes of social media. The project established a longitudinal ‘experimental zone’ as space and time for design in the everyday practice of the museum. The paper reflects upon the value of ANT as a framework for rethinking the design–use divide using concepts of learning and translations to bring awareness of co-design as temporal, fluid and emerging processes of becoming.     

The politics of co-design in ICT for sustainable development

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we discuss an approach to co-design in ICT for sustainable development. We first set out to consider sustainable development as incorporate a concern for resilience, adaptability, and autonomy. We then draw on an ongoing participatory design project to illustrate how co-design projects can be configured, along with the political choices that this entails, to support such development.     

Framework of emergence: from chain of value to value constellation

ABSTRACT

For academic design programmes and research councils, finding mechanisms to measure impact and valuate co-design research projects is very difficult. The metric parameters – number of attendees, volume, shape, length – have shown to be insufficient. The subject matter, the subjects and matters, do not easily fit within these parameters, which fail to translate the value of a ‘constellation of affections’ that emerge throughout co-design processes. Emphasis on quantifiable impact derives from particular ways of understanding production, reproduction, and dissemination of knowledge. This paper understands academic design programmes as a technology to discuss axiology in co-design practices. This paper re-configures a techno-logic of value; from chain of value to value constellation, intersecting a co-design case study with readings of Simondon’s philosophy of technology and Barad’s agential realism. Ageing Playfully was a knowledge exchange project from The Creative Exchange programme, that involved people living with dementia and their caregivers co-designing interventions to boost mobility and well-being. At the core, this paper, explores an axiological move that informs a framework of emergence, a way of thinking in methods to account for the value of co-design as site of emergence.     

Co-design and urban resilience: visioning tools for commoning resilience practices

Abstract

In response to the environmental and social challenges of an uncertain future, practitioners and communities across Europe and beyond have started to engage with the concept of ‘resilience’ and experiment with forms of local resilience. However, many of these initiatives tend to remain localised, isolated projects, with little capacity to instigate broader change and at risk to disappear by not having the means to become sustainable in the longer term. We suggest that one way of sustaining and scaling local resilience practices is by developing digital tools that could enable connections and knowledge sharing across locations, through commoning in the digital realm. In this paper, we introduce the specific co-design process we devised with the aim to develop an initial ‘brief’ for potential tools. By creating a co-design process that is situated, mediated, networked and open-source, we argue that the commoning process initiated in this project has the potential to evolve and expand, beyond the project time and initial user base—an essential quality in the context of collectively enhancing urban resilience through knowledge sharing and mutual support.     

Co-designing health promotion at a science centre: distributing expertise and granting modes of participation

Abstract

Museums and science centres are increasingly employing participatory approaches to exhibition design. Despite the increasing interest, the dynamics, challenges and benefits of employing participatory methods in museum design remain under-researched. Ensuring that audiences are involved requires reflections on the aim of the participation, and on the implications of its practical and institutional embeddedness. We analyse how co-design frames the meeting between disciplinary fields, as well as achieving audience involvement, through the case of the PULSE project. Here, designers, researchers, and families co-designed a health-promoting exhibition at a Danish science centre. We investigate how the co-design process was shaped between the fields of health promotion research and exhibition design practice. We describe how audiences and professionals were redefined and repositioned, and how tensions arose and necessitated negotiations of expertise, authority and modes of participation. The ideal of visitor involvement created tensions with existing design and development practices complicating the translation of user experience into exhibition design.     

BIM技术在牵引供电系统设计中的应用研究

基于BIM技术,采用Autodesk Revit为设计平台．实现电气化铁路牵引供电系统三维数字化设计,包括电气设备族的建立,三维布置模型的生成,后期的碰撞检查、协同设计等,提出电气化铁路牵引变电站全寿命周期管理的理念。     

COVALENT,a method for co-designing value exchange in community-centred design

Abstract

It is challenging to design for mutually beneficial relationships in a multi-actor service system when these actors have diverse and conflicting interests, and lack usable methods and tools that support the design process. This study introduces a novel method for co-designing value exchange (COVALENT). COVALENT integrates the value analysis model, co-design strategy and service design tools, to support the conceptualisation of reciprocal value exchanges based on the analysis of and matching between, stakeholders’ needs and resources. Its perceived effectiveness was validated through application to the development of community business models in Ulsan, South Korea. This study contributes to the knowledge of co-design by providing a method for co-designing services that aim to achieve reciprocal value exchanges in the context of community-centred design and by discussing the effectiveness of that method as perceived by users.     

Using interactive model simulations in co-design: An experiment in urban design

This paper presents an experiment in which people performed a co-design task in urban design, using a multi-user touch table application with or without interactive model simulations. We hypothesised that using the interactive model simulations would improve communication and co-operation between co-design participants, would help participants to develop shared understanding and would positively affect the co-design process and its outcomes. However, our experiment (involving 60 people in 20 co-design sessions) only partly confirmed these hypotheses. People positively evaluated the interactive model simulation tools (an interactive map of an urban area, interactive models for traffic, sound, sight and safety, and ‘tangibles’), and these tools promoted communication and co-operation, and the exploration of design solutions. However, people's experiences of social cohesion and their satisfaction with their own contribution to the co-design process were better without these tools, possibly because using these tools drew people's attention towards these interactive model simulations and away from the dynamics between the participants. We therefore advocate using such tools selectively, for example, early on in a co-design process, to improve shared understanding of the contents of the problem, rather than later on, when people need to focus on their fellow participants and on the processes of communication and co-operation.     

How cultural knowledge shapes core design thinking—a situation specific analysis

Abstract

The growing trend of co-creation and co-design in cross-cultural design teams presents challenges for the design thinking process. We integrate two frameworks, one on reasoning patterns in design thinking, the other on the dynamic constructivist theory of culture, to propose a situation specific framework for the empirical analysis of design thinking in cross-cultural teams. We illustrate the framework with a qualitative analysis of 16 episodes of design related conversations, which are part of a design case study. The results show that cultural knowledge, either as shared by the cross-cultural team or group specific knowledge of some team members, shape the reasoning patterns in the design thinking process across all the 16 episodes. Most of the design discussions were approached by the designers as problem situations that were formulated in a backward direction, where the value to create was known first. Then the designers were using available cultural knowledge to articulate the unknown what to design (products/services) and how the design would work (the working principles of product/services). In conclusion, we demonstrate a novel approach for understanding how cultural knowledge shapes core design thinking in specific situations.     

The breakdown of the municipality as caring platform: lessons for co-design and co-learning in the age of platform capitalism

ABSTRACT

If municipalities were the caring platforms of the 19-20th century sharing economy, how does care manifest in civic structures of the current period? We consider how platforms – from the local initiatives of communities transforming neighbourhoods, to the city, in the form of the local authority – are involved, trusted and/or relied on the design of shared services and amenities for the public good. We use contrasting cases of interaction between local government and civil society organisations in Sweden and the UK to explore trends in public service provision. We look at how care can manifest between state and citizens and at the roles that co-design and co-learning play in developing contextually sensitive opportunities for caring platforms. In this way, we seek to learn from platforms in transition about the importance of co-learning in political and structural contexts and make recommendations for the co-design of (digital) platforms to care with and for civil society.     

Co-designing for common values: creating hybrid spaces to nurture autonomous cooperation

ABSTRACT

The paper concerns the development of digitally-mediated technologies that value social cooperation as a common good rather than as a source of revenue and accumulation. The paper discusses the activities that shaped a European participatory design project which aims to develop a digital space that promotes and facilitates the ‘Commonfare’, a complementary approach to social welfare. The paper provides and discusses concrete examples of design artifacts to address a key question about the role of co- and participatory design in developing hybrid spaces that nurture sharing and autonomous cooperation: how can co-design practices promote alternatives to the commodification of digitally-mediated cooperation? The paper argues for a need to focus on relational, social, political and ethical values, and highlights the potential power of co- and participatory design processes to achieve this. In summary, the paper proposes that only by re-asserting the centrality of shared values and capacities, rather than individual needs or problems, co-design can reposition itself thereby encouraging autonomous cooperation.     

A Europe of ‘Petites Europes’: an evolutionary perspective on transnational cooperation on spatial planning*

ABSTRACT

Using a historical-institutionalist framework, this paper discusses the emergence and evolution of transnational cooperation initiatives in post-war Europe. A number of critical junctures can be identified at which different goals and approaches were introduced. Due to the path-dependent nature of institutional arrangements, this has resulted in increasingly fuzzy rationales and contradictory objectives for transnational regions in Europe today. The paper concludes with a reflection on the value of historical institutionalism to identify the malleability of such complex policy concepts and the key challenges that transnational regions are facing due to unresolved tensions in their policy design and evolution.     

The semiotics of landscape design communication: towards a critical visual research approach in landscape architecture

In landscape architecture, visual representations are the primary means of communication between stakeholders in design processes. Despite the reliance on visual representations, little critical research has been undertaken by landscape architects on how visual communication forms work or their socio-political implications. In this theoretical paper, we argue that such research is of great importance. We explain how concepts of visual and critical social theory such as visual semiotics, simulacra and simulation, and power/knowledge can be used to critically reflect on landscape architectural representations. We further propose to study these representations at different stages of meaning-making by using visual methodologies such as visual discourse analysis, iconographical content analysis and social semiotic analysis. We conclude that these research approaches have the potential to explain issues such as dominant power structures, miscommunication between participants, and visual path-dependencies during landscape design processes.     

Co-producing,curating, and defining design knowledge in an online practitioner community

ABSTRACT

As co-design and other participatory design practices increasingly make design outcomes more accessible to everyday citizens, it is also important to understand how designers negotiate the value of design knowledge that undergirds design action and share this knowledge within their own community to facilitate and evolve their practices. In this study, we analyze UX practitioners’ interactions on Reddit, including patterns of resource sharing and curation that point towards a collective construction of UX as a design discipline. We identified how knowledge from diverse sources was selected and shared with the subreddit community (co-production); the resources that community members engaged with and to what extent (curation); and the collective body of knowledge that characterised the design community (definition of design knowledge). We found that boundary work that sought to define the value of UX knowledge often took place at the periphery of shared resources, either expanding or rearticulating the boundary of UX knowledge in relation to trends in employment and nascent professionalisation. Implications of this work for the co-creation of knowledge to support design practices are considered, focusing on how design knowledge concomitantly shapes and is shaped by client-directed design action.     

In the details: the micro-ethics of negotiations and in-situ judgements in participatory design with marginalised children

ABSTRACT

Engaging marginalised children, such as disabled children, in Participatory Design (PD) entails particular challenges. The processes can effect social changes by decidedly attending to their lived experience as expertise. However, involving marginalised children in research also requires maintaining a delicate balance between ensuring their right to participation as well as their protection from harm. The resulting tensions are politically charged, affected by myriads of power differences and create moral dilemmas. We present seven case studies, drawing from two participatory design research projects. They illustrate the in-situ judgements taken to address specific dilemmas and provide nuanced insights into the trade-offs required by child-led participatory design processes. Subsequently, we identify three challenges: positioning our work to the children’s carers’ values, protecting ourselves, and enabling the (relative) risk-taking associated with participation for children. We call for this micro-ethical approach to be used when reporting research ethics in practice, and as a guidance for the training of researchers and practitioners.     

Analysing design suggestions and use of resources in co-design of educational software: A case study

This naturalistic study focuses on how the co-design of educational software is an activity mediated by and through communicative resources. The aim is to identify how design suggestions and the use of resources emerge in co-design. This study contributes to the growing interest in understanding aspects of collaboration in design. To understand the phenomenon of collaboration in design, we apply interaction analysis, dialogism and the sociocultural perspective to show which resources the participants use and how they negotiate design suggestions. We argue that such understanding is only visible through detailed analysis of naturally occurring co-design activities. We find that the design trajectory varies in how the participants orient themselves to each other and in relation to the design artefacts. Tensions make visible which communicative resources are sensitive to what the participants interpret as relevant in the context of their institutional norms and values. Their different positions must be negotiated. Together, these aspects orient the design and mediate the emerging consensus and design artefact.     

基于BIM正向设计的建筑防火审查工具研究

BIM正向设计是BIM理念与技术深入融合后的必然选择,但就目前现状来看,仍然面临诸多挑战。近年来,随着创新监管方式及推进数字化交付等工作目标的提出,基于BIM技术的智能审查方法逐渐成为业内关注的热点。在BIM正向设计实践的基础上,提出了一种在BIM正向设计阶段快速高效赋予消防审查信息的方法,并成功开发了基于此的消防自动化校审工具AtCheck,为正向设计与自动审查的研究及应用提供新思路,供建筑设计从业者参考借鉴。     

Generating value across academic and professional design practice in the Internet of Things

ABSTRACT

This article accounts for how value in design research can be derived from knowledge exchange that occurs through the collaborative discourse of doing design. To demonstrate this point, the article details the arc and impact of a design research collaboration that extended over several years with design practitioners in the field of internet-connected devices. As a result of this ongoing collaborative work, a programmatic set of design ideals and intentions concerning how to construct a more transparent and ethical relationship with technology was shaped. We examine this sustained and transformative collaboration as a series of knowledge exchanges. Within each particular collaborative project, worldviews and knowledge are exchanged among design researchers and practitioners, enabling them to traverse ‘through practices’ of academic and professional design. To unpack these exchanges and how they built and fed into each other, the article examines how collaboration unfolded and produced value on two levels: first on the scale of the academics and practitioners directly involved in a project; and secondly on the scale of the larger international community of design practitioners concerned with Internet-connected devices, with whom we had shared our work.     

Ordering in disguise: digital integration in built-environment practices

ABSTRACT

The digital integration of built-environment practices aims to bridge a large variety of organizations to improve building delivery and operation. However, recent research on building information modelling (BIM) reported organizational challenges arising from digital integration. This suggests a need to develop a critical perspective on digital-integration-driven organizational change. Adopting a practice-based approach, this paper exposes the practice-level phenomenon responsible for the ongoing change to develop a critical understanding and enable better interventions. The concepts of ‘simplification’ and ‘systematization’ of digital integration are developed from previous literature and then used to explore and interrelate the practice-level experiences of digital integration (i.e. the experience of the change from within) and the emerging patterns of interactions (i.e. the picture of the change from outside) in a BIM-enabled design project. The concept of ‘ordering in disguise’ is proposed to capture this phenomenon. It shows that practitioners experience digital integration as various task-specific instances of unresponsive technology. However, they are unaware that their ongoing efforts to accommodate it actually further reinforce digital integration’s simplification and systematization. This makes the unresponsiveness of technology harder to challenge, and ultimately forces the organization to change and adapt to it. Implications for management of practice are outlined.