Abstract 6: Conceiving convincing concepts (ACCEPTED)

Clarifying the build-up of an adaptive theory using a ‘systematic’ mental work map, I will lead you through the thinking process of a just started PhD, situated in the field of participatory architecture and urban design.
Under the conscious title of “True” Participation , formal expressions in architectures based on trust will be explored. Trust is used here as confidence between the aesthetical elements (forms) and the ethical conditions (actions) in architecture.

‘The public should be involved in planning as much as possible!’,
has been shouted in the 60’ties, in the 70’ties even more.
And today it is imposed by law.

Thousands of papers are written on ‘public’ involvement in architectural and urban design. The number of people having written about it – most of them in an ideological and frustrated perspective opposing existing situations – is larger than the number of people actually having been involved in it. Almost every aspect in participation has been ‘academically’ described.

Recently Peter Blundell-Jones and Jeremy Till have tried to explain the renewed interest in this field. They feel that the time is right for a re-evaluation of participation, particularly given the European political context in which ‘participation’ has become a buzzword, but with little thought given to what the word actually means.

At least three (new) reasons can be summed up here.
Firstly, in contemporary global politics, where issues of democracy are so contested, true participation in the processes of change is becoming increasingly rare but at the same time its need is growing.

Secondly, because true participation concerns real engagement of all actors in the process rather than a grazing of the image, it could provide a counterpoint to the image-fuelled world of the media.
A final point is talking about a contemporary view on standard versions. The danger with a normative technique is that it sees the user (once again) as standard, there to be subjected to common methods. Instead, one has to accept that with multiple users, multiple desires and multiple contexts, multiple forms of participation are necessary.

The political dimension is too often avoided by differentiating between the functional and the aesthetic, treating the former as a purportedly objective terrain of ergonomics and efficiency, and seeing the latter as a kind of private language supposedly above the political debate. The functional and the aesthetic are NOT isolated, neutral terms! They must be placed within a more complex politicised world.

I will investigate this particular link between aesthetical dimensions and participation, thus sustainability: two items rarely linked to each-other. The discussion on the forms, build or not, related to participatory design, is rarely been researched as such.

Participation process in Hellersdorf, Berlin, 1998

2. PhD framework

The tons of emancipatory and democratic values incorporated in the investigated participatory architecture and urbanism, will be examined for their qualities.

This practice-led research on PD (Participatory Design), aiming to analyze socially and politically engaged (own and other's) design processes located in specific local contexts, will evidently describe instructional design tools that can be used in multiple contexts. Unavoidably, I will start generalising lists of series of work methods and end up in a how-to guide.
The adventurous stories, each time different, of interesting PD-cases will be rationalised. And by doing so, they will lose their uniqueness’s, reason for their success. By questioning and evaluating the qualities of both the design processes as well as the design outcome in a 'scientific' / 'research' way, I will suddenly split up the dual role played by myself as the (co-)designer of a project and as in the role in which I have a clear agenda and critical expertise to provide service, activities and outcome.

How then can I elaborate on my skills to run PD-projects from A to Z in a narrative way?
How to tell about cognitive values?

The following mental work map is showing a research-project design, with an intuitive character, that will evidently evolve and change.

The research project develops within three interacting layers: methods, form, concepts.

The middle and most important layer is called ‘Form’. This layer will investigate form elements in participatory design through stories. These stories are named with personal titles. By doing so, I intend to set up a lay-out and list of themes in the form discussion in which I start for every item from a real and detailed story in order to generalise and abstract it later on, looking for more conceptual and abstract research outcomes. By using these facts (including a description of their context), I want to emphasise on the personal character of forms.
This list of titles is now incomplete and will develop during the project; from a distance and analysed later on in pseudo-objective diagrams, mental maps, it is intended they will show an overview in the form discussion.

Important and necessary in the search for understanding these ‘forms’, I’ll regularly have to refer to the origins of these forms, situated in participatory processes. These action-processes are described in the upper layer, called ‘Methods’. The methods here are derived from and based on implicit and explicit skills, gained from a period of more than 15 years of experience in quite a number of participatory projects . This layer consists of different marked out sub-themes, each one described through one exemplary project.
The sub-theme ‘3D-models’ for instance will investigate the different use and meaning of models in Participatory Design-phases (PD-phases) and Action Design-phases (AD-phases). Using theories of Ehn, Kyng, Tversky and others, the tacit and explicit knowledge (tangible and intangible), embedded in these models will be differentiated.
The position of and experience with practise-led research within the Art & Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, England, is of particular interest to these investigations.

Two or more case-studies, popping up during the course of the PhD-project, will be incorporated in this layer.

In describing the forms through PD-methods, a ‘glossary’ framing necessary notions, is needed. In the layer ‘Terms & Concepts’, I will try to elaborate on appropriate definitions, needed to read through this thesis. Complexity for instance is used in very diverging ways. The contextualisation of these notions and hypotheses, both in the field of PD as well as in this thesis will be developed in this layer.

The three layers, always starting from the middle one, are linked in different ways.

As a whole, the scheme can be compared to the research finding methods of Kari Kurkela, setting up theories of ‘formal’ musical functions in diagrams.

The map can then be read vertically and horizontally.

Vertical blobs, overlapping some items in the three layers, will assist in the understanding of certain types of architecture based on trust.
Horizontal blobs will be helpful in building up a kind of manual, resulting eventually in a how-to guide for policymakers and practitioners in PD. As described in the introduction, there will always be an awareness of the danger of a ‘standard’ manual. Therefore, the ‘anti-manual’ will act as a ‘neutraliser’.

Finally, for now, this Project Design Map will function as a workplan and‘contents’-page, the page-numbers being fictive of course and filled in during the course of the research project.

Please check out the pdf file.