Community Building Through Participatory Design
How does design play a role in building communities
and creating a sense of home?
About the Webinar
‘Community Building through Participatory Design’ webinar seeks to rediscover design as a community building tool, as community practitioners and design experts share how participatory design tools and methodology can be used in our local context to co-create public and social spaces.
The webinar is organised by Participate in Design. Supported by DesignSingapore Council and National Design Centre. In partnership with BeFantastic: A Tech Art Initiative, COLOURS: Collectively Ours and Shophouse & Co.
This event is part of the National Design Centre’s “Singapore: Our Home” programme lineup for August — September 2020.
View the recorded webinar.
Frequently Asked Questions
Participatory Design in times of COVID-19. How might we bring participatory design into the digital space?
There are plenty of applications and softwares out in the market to explore. Some of the brainstorming spaces we have adopted recently are Mural, Miro, Microsoft Teams and Awwapp. These softwares have their own limitations and nothing can beat face to face engagement — it is hard, but it is not impossible. An application that is specific for citizen engagement would be Bang the table.
Beyond just creating spaces that have been successful in cultivating sense of belonging and comfort, are there spaces that has been impactful in resolving systemic needs in communities?
(Ms Kamya Ramachandran): In the Rural India project, the home owners who turned into skilled home builders earned alternate livelihoods as mater masons. They are now familiar with new earthquake safe construction technologies. Consequences do go beyond the built environment to building confidence and knowledge empowerment of the community.From Placemaking to Placekeeping, how do we encourage people to continue using the space?
The situation depends on who the stakeholders of the co-design process includes. When an organisation (i.e. School or Community Center) is the primary partner, programming tends to continue.
Design is a process that gathers inputs from different parties to come up with a solution that satisfies certain parameters. The more complex the input, the more successful the output. Authorities and institutions, if viewed as an equal party at the table who also has problems that needs to be solved, then design results can vary.
(Ms Kamya Ramachandran): In India, we have a problem with respect to resources and precise systems of execution to maintain even private properties, thus projects do suffer from the lack of maintenance. Long road ahead indeed!Inclusive Participatory Design
(Larry Yeung): P!D worked with preschool children for Hack Our Play. Educators, the children and their parents came together to co-create their ideal play space at St. James Church Kindergarten. We have since developed a free downloadable toolkit for anyone interested to hack their play!
In P!D’s participatory design framework, we always try our best to ensure that everyone’s voices in the community are heard and we curate and plan this process carefully with our stakeholders right from the beginning. This includes breaking down complex design concepts or terminologies into simpler ones (rule of thumb for simplicity: it has to be understandable for a 12 year old kid) so that everyone will be able to contribute to the co-creation process.Skillsets needed to be a participatory designer
Drawing is not an essential skill, effective communication is. The ability to speak well and in different languages, observational skills, taking down notes effectively, creating and designing questions and interaction for localised communities… there are many ways to creatively engage people in the participatory design process. Our advice is to not feel limited, but to just do it.Creating new connections with people from different cultural backgrounds
That’s where co-designing and co-creating can bridge the gap. Opportunities to co-design and co-create is a great way to go beyond boundaries and really aim to understand the ‘other’. In any engagement, it is important to first establish ground rules — that everybody present is an equal and deserves mutual respect.