Participatory Design Programming

Participatory design is an attitude about a force for change in the creation and management of environments for people. Its strength lies in being a movement that cuts across traditional professional boundaries and cultures. Its roots lie in the ideals of a participatory democracy where collective decision-making is highly decentralized throughout all sectors of society, so that all individuals learn participatory skills and can effectively participate in various ways in the making of all decisions that affect them. Often, the term participation is modified with different descriptors, resulting in terms such as community participation, citizen participation and public participation.

Today, participatory design processes are being applied to urban design, planning and geography as well as to the fields of industrial and information technology. Research findings suggest that positive outcomes are associated with solutions being informed by users’ tacit knowledge. More recently, another factor has been suggested as being partly responsible for favourable participatory design outcomes, which is described as collective intelligence. Tom Atlee, in his book The Tao of Democracy, describes collective intelligence as a shared insight that comes about through the process of group interaction, particularly where the outcome is more insightful and powerful than the sum of individual perspectives. When people align their individual intelligences in shared undertakings, instead of using their intelligence to undermine each other in pursuit of individual status, they are much more able to generate collective intelligence.

Three main issues have dominated the discourse in participatory design literature: (1) the politics of design, (2) the nature of participation and (3) the tools, techniques and methods for carrying out design and planning projects.

Public participation builds on classic democratic theory that those citizens who are affected by decisions should have a say in decisions that affect their lives because they will become better citizens. Participation is effective when the task is conceptualized in terms of what is to be accomplished when the need is acknowledged to involve citizens. And it is often the physical and environmental projects that citizens see directly affecting their lives. To create a condition in which [Page 590]people can act on their own environmental needs, in which they can make the distinction between the experts’ technical and aesthetic judgement, requires a change in the consciousness of both community members and professionals.

Citizen participation in community decision-making can be traced as far back as Plato’s Republic. Plato’s concepts of freedom of speech, assembly, voting and equal representation have evolved through the years to form the basis upon which the USA was established. Some historians support the notion that Americans have always wanted to be part of decisions affecting their lives. Freedom and the right to make decisions on the early American frontier was the shaping force in grass-roots democracy—in other words, people’s right to participate. As many frontier villages grew in population, it became increasingly difficult for every citizen to actively participate in all community decisions. To fill the void in the decision-making process, people began to delegate their involvement to a representative, which grew into the system of selecting officials by public elections and increased the number of volunteer associations and organizations. Although public participation can be approached and defined in many different ways, this discussion is concerned with participation aimed at issues involving community decision-making.

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