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Societal trends, such as the governmental withdrawal from the public realm, increasingly motivates communities to self-organize in taking care of it. As a result, designers have explored the concep...

In this article, we put forward the importance of engaging with the past in co-design projects. We argue that such an engagement helps situate and contextualise design projects, especially by tackling pre-existing assumptions and previous design legacies. In doing so, we reflect on the experience of setting up a project to explore and reactivate a neglected infrastructure of slow roads as a network of potential in sustainable mobility transition. We start by considering slow roads in relation to two design perspectives on thinging. First, by understanding thinging in the historical landscape as an agency of things to ‘design over time’, we explore how road infrastructures enact previous design models. Second, by looking at thinging as an approach of gathering and confronting heterogeneous perspectives in a design project, we engage with slow roads as socio-material assemblies that evolve in the design space over time. By revisiting the case study, we connect these two perspectives to propose thinging as a design approach that mediates between the historical landscape and the design space. In the discussion, we reflect on the methodology of the case to outline co-design strategies that aim to operationalise this approach of ‘thinging with the past’. This research was supported by funding from the European Union, through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network ‘CHEurope: Critical Heritage Studies and the Future of Europe’ H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions 722416.This study was supported by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Hasselt University.

Spatial densification is an ongoing process in most cities today, but has an uneasy relation with the liveability of our environments. In this article, we approach this uneasy relationship between densification and liveability as a ‘matter of scales’ and work consciously with the tensions which arise, such as a lack of communication and mistrust. We analyse a case of urban design and discuss how the participatory design approach of ‘experiential evaluation’ as a ‘scaling device’ was deployed to support the formation of a ‘scaling platform’ around this matter of scale. This scaling platform has the ambition to connect the multiple actors across multiple scales to make the tensions between scales constructive. In the discussion, we present the learnings of the design process and the challenges that we encountered.

Densification, as a sustainable spatial development strategy, is a matter of care that takes place on multiple scales and is related to liveability in a paradoxical way. In this paper we approach this paradox related to densification as a "matter of scales" and work consciously with the tensions which arise when multiple actors act on multiple scales, such as a lack of communication and mistrust. We analyse and discuss how the participatory design approach of "experiential evaluation" supports this conscious approach by giving form to it as a caring platform around a "matter of scale" by connecting the multiple actors across multiple scales and making the tensions between scales constructive. In the discussion, we present the learnings of the design process and the challenges that we encountered.

In this article, we argue that an engagement with the uses of the past in the design space can support better situated participatory design approaches in the context of spatial development. We start from a case study where we explored how the redevelopment of a post-industrial site affected the local actors and their existing dynamics. By reflecting on this residency, we investigate how different actors engaged with the past in the design space to design, qualify or challenge the redevelopment project. The article outlines an approach towards redefining the design space by staging it as historical through archival research, document analysis and spatio-temporal mapping, and by using participatory mapping to articulate the tensions between agentive identities.

The increasing polarization of sustainability debates has enhanced the need for designers to re-engage with the politics of sustainable futures. This paper particularly explores these debates in (Flemish suburban) dwelling contexts, where sustainable development strategies such as densification and depaving trigger conflicts between dwellers, policy-makers, designers and organisations. We researched how a design anthropological approach could enable design researchers to go beyond polarization by collaboratively researching the politics of how dwelling futures are being shaped in people's everyday lives. We particularly explored the co-production, curation and reworking of dwelling patterns as an approach that can combine the situated approach of design anthropology and the dialogical approach of participatory design in engaging with the politics of everyday dwelling and dwelling futures. This study was supported by ERA-NET Cofund Smart Urban Futures(ENSUF), Urban Europe, 2017-2019 and by the Special Research Fund(BOF) of Hasselt University. Our research was developed in the frameworkof the CAPA.CITY project. We would like to thank all the partners of theproject, we would like to especially thank Thomas Lomm ee for its collabora-tion and for supporting us to develop the prototyping toolkit via the opensource system OpenStructures

participatory planning; decision making; methodological approach; collective learning; enabling tools

Sharing design decisions between designers and the people we design for and with, is a common aim in participatory design (PD). When working with people with dementia this rarely happens in explicit ways. Design decisions implicitly emerge from the relationships designers build with people with dementia. We argue that designers should value this relational approach and make transparent how it informs the design decisions. We were inspired by how person-centred care (FCC) is used by care practitioners to explain how they work in a relational way with people with dementia. In this paper, we explore how PCC can support PD researchers to acquire relational expertise, which we illustrate by means of a design project for and with people with dementia. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Designers are increasingly involved in designing alternative futures for their cities, together with or self-organized by citizens. This article discusses the fact that (groups of) citizens often lack the support or negotiation power to engage in or sustain parts of these complex design processes. Therefore the “capabilities” of these citizens to collectively visualize, reflect, and act in these processes need to be strengthened. We discuss our design process of “democratic dialogues” in Traces of Coal—a project that researches and designs together with the citizens an alternative spatial future for a partially obsolete railway track in the Belgian city of Genk. This process is framed in a Participatory Design approach and, more specifically, in what is called “infrastructuring,” or the process of developing strategies for the long-term involvement of participants in the design of spaces, objects, or systems. Based on this process, we developed a typology of how the three clusters of capabilities (i.e., visualize, reflect, and act) are supported through democratic dialogues in PD processes, linking them to the roles of the designer, activities, and used tools. ispartof: Design Issues vol:34 issue:4 pages:80-80 status: published

In this introductory article to the special issue Co-Design and the public realm', we discuss a common interest in how meso- and macro-political institutional contexts frame and are informed by Participatory Design (PD) and Co-Design processes. We argue that a unilateral focus within PD and Co-Design on the micro-political scale of fieldwork obscures interactivity with institutional framing processes, undermining their potential as sites of critique and political change. Our argument is drawn from a study of literature on the role of institutions in relation to PD and the public realm and our experience as participants in an EU-funded research project. The case study descriptions unpack how various institutional frames inform PD processes and how, conversely, PD processes inform various institutional frames: metacultural frames, institutional action frames and policy frames. To highlight the move to engaging with and creating new institutions, we introduce the notion of institutioning. This work was supported by Marie Curie Initial Training Networks (ITN), FP7-PEOPLE-2013-ITN.

This paper discusses counterfactual scripting to critically inquire and give form to Participatory Design (PD) processes in an age of ubiquitous participation. In its often superficial application in various societal domains, the processes and instruments for participation are often cut loose from their political context. The stories of what has happened in a PD process are told through a clear storyline that develops logically via different design moves towards a well-defined plot; leaving out any alternative narratives. Inspired by counterfactual history, we reject this teleological perspective and explore counterfactual scripting as a way to give renewed attention to the political context in PD. We do this by giving form to the design process as a pluralistic process that not only focuses on the future, but creates alternatives for the past to speculate about the future. We evaluate counterfactual thinking in a participatory architecture and urban planning process. peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=ncdn20 ispartof: CoDesign vol:13 issue:2 pages:96-109 status: published

In recente debatten over stadsontwikkeling zien we een grotere vraag van individuele bewoners en burgerbewegingen naar inspraak in het beleid, ook buiten de verkiezingstijd. Dit daagt overheden, maar ook burgerbewegingen uit om op zoek te gaan naar manieren om die grotere diversiteit van mensen en groepen een stem te geven. Via de interventie De Eendagspartij onderzochten Niek Kosten en Liesbeth Huybrechts hoe ontwerpers een rol kunnen spelen in het creëren van ruimte voor een grotere verscheidenheid aan stemmen in het debat in en over de stad. De auteurs verkenden meer bepaald een vorm van grafisch ontwerp die uitgaat van het dagelijks leven van politieke partijen, bewonersgroepen en mensen in de stad en hoe zij zich grafisch uitdrukken rond bepaalde thema’s. Dit noemen ze ‘vernaculair ontwerp’.

In this paper we draw upon the articles included in this special issue to question how to re-politicise co-design and participatory design (PD). Many authors in these fields have recently made a plea to re-engage with ‘big issues’ as a way to address this concern. At the same time, there is an increased attention into the micro-politics of the relations that are built-in co-design and PD. These two approaches are sometimes presented as working against each other with a de-politicising dynamic as a result. The editorial hypothesis of this issue is that designing visions can turn the tension between addressing the big issues and close attention to the particularity of relations into a motor for re-politicising design. Through engaging with literature, the articles presented in this issue, and two fieldwork cases that explore this dynamic, we discovered that paying careful attention to the activity of designing visions can support re-politicisation. While visions enable us to develop relations with close attention to their politics, building relations supports a more political approach to designing visions on issues. We argue that vision-making can particularly support re-politicisation when it enables the articulation of the political by relating its situated reality to how it unfolds in space and time.

When we, as editors of this Special Issue, started organising the Participatory Design Conference in 2018, we chose the topic “Politics of Design”. It was a plea for engaging politically as partici...

Dit artikel beschrijft een participatief ontwerpend onderzoeksproces, ‘Kolensporen’, waarin een aantal ruimtelijke en maatschappelijke kwesties elkaar kruisen. In dit proces geeft ons ontwerpend onderzoeksteam alternatieve ruimtelijke toekomsten vorm voor een oud Kolenspoor, samen met (of zelf-georganiseerd door) kleine burger- en professionele initiatieven, grootschalige initiatieven en lokaal beleid. ‘Kolensporen’ gaat de uitdaging aan om kleinschalige initiatieven mee de regels van het complexe ontwerpproces te laten bepalen, hoewel ze niet altijd de steun of onderhandelingsmacht hebben om hierin mee te doen. Ons standpunt is dat een uitgebreide aandacht voor het opbouwen van vaardighe- den (ofwel capaciteitsopbouw) van de betrokken initiatieven in het deelnemen aan partici- patief ontwerpend onderzoek een mogelijke manier is om met deze uitdaging om te gaan. Doordat we het korte traject van dit project kaderen in een Living Lab met een langdurig engagement in de stad, kunnen we met deze groepen vaardigheden ontdekken, overstijgen en ruimte geven om verder te ontwikkelen. We zullen toelichten dat we dit capaciteitsop- bouw-proces vormgeven via het concept van de democratische dialoog, ondersteund door een diversiteit aan infrastructuren, ontwerpers- en deelnemersrollen. We eindigen met een discussie over de uitdagingen van het expliciet aandacht besteden aan vaardigheden in complexe ontwerpprocessen.

In this chapter, the authors use actor-network theory (ANT) to explore the relations between uncertainties in co-design processes and the quality of participation. To do so, the authors investigate Latour's discussion uncertainties in relation to social processes: the nature of actors, actions, objects, facts/matters of concern, and the study of the social. To engage with the discussion on uncertainties in co-design and, more specific in infrastructuring, this chapter clusters the diversity of articulations of the role and place of uncertainty in co-design into four uncertainty models: (1) the neoliberal, (2) the management, (3) the disruptive, and (4) the open uncertainty model. To deepen the reflections on the latter, the authors evaluate the relations between the role and place of uncertainty in two infrastructuring processes in the domain of healthcare and the quality of these processes. In the final reflections, the authors elaborate on how ANT supported in developing a “lens” to assess how uncertainties hinder or contribute to the quality of participation.

In this paper, we will be discussing how visualisations can facilitate participatory processes by way of conveying issues of public concern as ‘things’. In the line of Latour’s plea to ‘make things public’, visualisations can be purposefully designed to trigger and encourage public debates concerning a wide range of issues. For this, we explore how a visualisation can be both transparent (i.e. visualising the complex entanglement of backstories of an issue) and readable. Specifically, we clarify the aspect of designing a readable visualisation of ‘things’. First, drawing from different fields of literature (i.e. Information Visualisation, Science and Technology Studies and Human-Computer-Interaction) we will articulate three main aspects of readability: engaging people to interact with a visualisation of complex issues, supporting sense making and encouraging reflection. Then, based on three empirical case studies, we indicate different design considerations in terms of engaging people to interact with a ...

In this article the authors use Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to explore the relationship between uncertainties in co-design processes and the quality of participation. They investigate discussion of uncertainties in social processes concerning the nature of actors, actions, objects, facts/matters of concern and the study of the social. To discuss uncertainties in co-design, and more specifically in infrastructuring processes, this article groups the diversity of articulations of the role and place of uncertainty in co-design into four uncertainty models: the (1) neoliberal uncertainty model, (2) uncertainty management model, (3) disruptive uncertainty model and (4) open uncertainty model. The authors qualitatively evaluate the relationship between the role and place of uncertainty in two infrastructuring processes in the domain of design for healthcare and the quality of these processes. They elaborate on how ANT supported them in developing a ‘lens' to assess how uncertainties hinder or contribute to the quality of participation.