Diálogos democráticos que fazem funcionar as cidades

Abstract

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), which permits reproduction, adaptation, and distribution provided the original author and source are credited. AbstractThe field of Strategic Design supports designers in researching and designing for the complexity of today's cities by embracing the idea of strategic dialogue, in which designers align with different actors and their interests. In this article, we discuss how democratic dialogues -foregrounded in the Participatory Design (PD) tradition -play a role in complex urban design processes (i.e. 'infrastructuring') and entail different types of dialogues of which strategic dialogue is merely one. After framing Strategic Design and PD, we describe five designer roles and their associated dialogues. This description forms the basis of an exploratory typology of democratic dialogues that was applied and exemplified in a case study about a Living Lab in the neighbourhood of Genk. The Lab attempts to design alternative futures for work in the city together with citizens, public and private organisations. We claim that engaging with this typology allows designers to understand and design infrastructuring processes in the urban context and to open up different design dialogues and roles for discussion.Keywords: democratic dialogues, living lab, urban context, designer roles, infrastructuring. ResumoO campo do design estratégico apoia o trabalho de designers que pesquisam e projetam para a complexidade das cidades de hoje. De fato, ao abraçar a ideia do diálogo estratégico, os designers se alinham com diferentes atores e seus interesses. Neste artigo, discutimos como diálogos democráticos -que estão em primeiro plano na tradição do Design Participativo (PD) -são relevantes em processos complexos de design urbano (ou seja, de "infraestruturação") e implicam diferentes tipos de diálogos, entre os quais o diálogo estratégico é apenas um. Depois de enquadrar Design Estratégico e PD, descrevemos cinco papéis do designer e seus relativos diálogos. Esta descrição constitui a base de uma tipologia exploratória de diálogos democráticos que foi aplicada e exemplificada em um estudo de caso sobre um Living Lab, no bairro de Genk. O Lab tenta projetar futuros alternativos para o trabalho na cidade, juntamente com os cidadãos, organizações públicas e privadas. Afirmamos que se envolver com esta tipologia permite que os designers entendam e projetem processos de infraestruturação no contexto urbano e se abram para diferentes diálogos de design e papéis para a discussão.Palavras-chave: diálogos democráticos, living lab, contexto urbano, papéis do designer, infraestruturação.

Exploring participatory pre-project processes: Making research work in municipality organizations

“…Initially the project should work with different care receivers with different care needs while the final project involved three protective housing facilities for young adults (typically aged [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] on the Autistic spectrum. The project partners became municipality care workers, the local management at the three housing facilities, the people with autism living in these houses and their close relatives.…”

“…With its roots in action research and IT related knowledge generation projects, Participatory Design projects have been conducted and disseminated for over four decades [9,13]. With time, the PD community has broaden its scope, expanding from a workplace and knowledge perspective to also embrace for example prototyping and implementing (IT-)solutions [1,20], designing and supporting communities [12,17] and shaping future cities [22,23]. A legacy from the early PD projects like Utopia [10] include workshop methods and how to engage users in technology development through prototyping and participation in early design processes [11].…”

Shifting towards community-building in opening up FabLabs for non-expert users

“…Le Dantec and Fox (2015) address the role of researchers, confidants, advocates, interlopers, invaders, and collaborators within community-based PD to build relationships within the community. Huybrechts et al (2016) point to the roles of the designer as catalyst, as facilitator or 'match-maker', as trigger of 'publics', as co-designer and as design activist. Finally, Yip et al (2017) address designers' roles in design activities based on the role of the participating children, pinpointing the complementarity between children and designer roles.…”