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Designing for the (semi)public realm, like for public infrastructure, mobility, community-building or health care, involves a large complexity of human and non-human actors. Fields like Participatory Design (PD) and Co- Design have used and experimented with qualitative research methods to support the democratic involvement of this complexity of actors when designing for issues of public concern. In the seventies, PD researchers focussed a lot on using research as a vehicle to involve workers, management or policy in deciding how new technologies would be introduced in their work environments. Today, they have extended their activities beyond the workplace and have entered many more areas of public realm, within much less defined spatial and professional boundaries. This makes it challenging to make sense of who is concerned and thus need to be involved. This session reflects on how different scholars use and experiment with qualitative research methods to represent and bring together different voices in giving form to aspects that are part of the rich complexity of the public realm. Which methods of representation do you chose? How to decide when you have represented enough different perspectives on the issue? How do you represent the gaps (who/what you have left out)? Etc. ; https://kuleuvencongres.be/ECQI2018/abstract-boek-ecqi-2018-final.pdf

Urban interfaces are often understood as straightforward media to foster a standardized customer engagement of citizens with and in smart city processes. In contrast, in this essay we take Johanna Drucker's humanities approach to interfaces as a starting point to redefine the urban interface as a critical zone of relations between multiple frameworks and embodied users. Our aim is to explore the merits of this approach in an urban development project around an old railway track in Genk (Belgium). Here, a low-tech urban interface—a leather carpet—was gradually developed as different people and institutions gave shape to their surroundings, and a more embedded and critical urban intelligence was realized in a process of democratic participatory design.

Urban interfaces are often understood as straightforward media to foster a standardized customer engagement of citizens with and in smart city processes. In contrast, in this essay we take Johanna Drucker's humanities approach to interfaces as a starting point to redefine the urban interface as a critical zone of relations between multiple frameworks and embodied users. Our aim is to explore the merits of this approach in an urban development project around an old railway track in Genk (Belgium). Here, a low-tech urban interface—a leather carpet—was gradually developed as different people and institutions gave shape to their surroundings, and a more embedded and critical urban intelligence was realized in a process of democratic participatory design.

Flanders is spatially dispersed. This mode of urbanisation comes with a high social cost. The current planning paradigm, strategic spatial planning, argues that the retrofitting of dispersed urbanisation requires a continuous public debate, and that such a debate depends on both a process of civic participation and a process of spatial capacity building. This paper researches how spatial designers can support this process of capacity building. It does this by discussing two explorative case studies. ; This project receives funding from the European Union's seventh framework programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 608299

At the HKDI Desis Lab 'open design' is a way to approach a complex design context such as design for healthcare, residential communities, politics, work, homelessness etc. wherein both humans as well as artefacts are involved (Latour, 2005; Akrich, 1992; Ehn, 2008). The lab's approach is closely related to how openness is approached in Participatory Design (PD). Participatory design was introduced in the 1970s. Users and designers would collaboratively work together to create better products. Participatory design thus searches ways to enhance and share power in decision-making in the design process with those who are affected by the design, thus opening the design process for their input (Ehn 2008). Likewise, the lab has strong relations to the approaches of Social Design and Design for Social Innovation1 , wherein design is used to achieve societal goals. This involves sharing and thus open up social resources (e.g. competences) that may or may not already exist in a certain community among citizens and designers, to reach a certain goal. An example of this, is the lab's research into how people without homes in Hong Kong and designers learn from each other's experiences and competences in building temporary street homes and - by extension - an alternative future for their city. ; HKDI

Planning processes often cause tensions between institutions and citizens because the local knowledge and values of the citizens are not included in the decision-making process, which can cause mistrust. This article builds on an ongoing PhD research that explores the potential of experiential evaluation as an alternative and experimental approach to "hybrid forums": an approach to open the participatory planning process for diverse actors and values. In order to render tensions visible and constructive in the participatory planning process, experiential evaluation creates "risky situations" in these hybrid forums. To discuss this approach of experiential evaluation, we use a methodological and analytical framework based on the four steps of strategic navigation techniques: tracing, mapping, diagramming, and agencying. We use these techniques to analyse two risky situations that were created through experiential evaluation within the participatory planning process of the neighbourhood spatial plan (NSP) of Zwijnaarde (Ghent, Belgium). Based on the analysis of the case, we observed that experiential evaluation was able to render tensions visible, but did not yet make them constructive. However, as a framework for a dialogue between institutions and citizens, the NSP leaves room to continue the experiential evaluation process that was initiated and to take further care of tensions on a smaller scale.

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

When defining participation in urban renewal projects in a political sense, this concept implies the challenging of power relations in each of its dimensions while addressing the need for knowledge, action and consciousness. Knowledge is defined as a resource which affects observable decision making. Action looks at who is involved in the production of such knowledge in order to challenge and shape the political agenda. Consciousness is how the production of knowledge changes the awareness or worldview of those involved, thus shaping the psychological and conceptual boundaries of what is possible. This paper addresses these politics of participation via the use of gamification, and more particularly gamified participatory artefacts. We discuss how a 'good' participatory planning process implies rebalancing existing power relations via the redistribution of knowledge, consciousness and actions, and aims to operationalize this ambition through a game. We particularly focus on the urban renewal process of one particular case, namely the Vennestraat-one of the main commercial streets of the city of Genk (BE) and present a three year participatory mapping process that made use of three gamified participatory artefacts (i.e., socio-economic network mapping, gathering mental images and scenario games). After uncovering the complex field of power relations in the entrepreneurial street, we analyze the different types of relations/groups that emerge from this participatory mapping process. The paper concludes with an analytical framework that employs gamified participatory artefacts in order to map and understand power relations and the mechanisms that frame them. ; Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe: 857160. ; Constantinescu, TI (corresponding author), Hasselt Univ, Spatial Capac Bldg Grp, Architecture Dept, B-3590 Diepenbeek, Belgium. teodora.constantinescu@uhasselt.be; oswald.devisch@uhasselt.be; liesbeth.huybrechts@uhasselt.be

This workshop1 aims to provide insight in and research collaboratively with the participants how Hannah Arendt's philosophy can contribute to the discussion about `Participatory Design and Democracy'. The Workshop addresses and discusses how Arendt's understanding of democracy in her book The Human Condition [1] can support design research in questioning if and how far PD is currently regenerating the democratic discourse in local and international contexts. The workshop is framed in the context of the DESIS Philosophy Talks [2], an initiative of DESIS Network [3] _in collaboration with the Design and Democracy Platform [4]. These talks address practical issues and topics that emerge from action-based design research by using the lenses of philosophy, and exploring how the result of these discussions can add meaningful value to design research as such.Full text at ACM