Participatory Design Theory ― Using Technology and Social Media to Foster Civic Engagement

In recent years, many countries all over Europe have witnessed a demand for a more direct form of democracy, ranging from improved clarity of information to being directly involved in decision-making procedures. Increasingly, governments are putting citizen participation at the centre of their policy objectives, striving for more transparency, to engage and empower local individuals and communities to collaborate on public projects and to encourage self-organization.

This book explores the role of participatory design in keeping these participatory processes public. It addresses four specific lines of enquiry: how can the use and/or development of technologies and social media help to diversify, to coproduce, to interrupt and to document democratic design experiments? Aimed at researchers and academics in the fields of urban planning and participatory design, this book includes contributions from a range of experts across Europe including the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Spain, France, Romania, Hungary and Finland.

Oswald Devisch is Associate Professor in Urban Design at Hasselt University, Belgium. He is coordinator of the research cluster Spatial Capacity Building and explores themes such as collective learning, casual participation, autonomous urbanization and the gamification of participation.

Liesbeth Huybrechts is Associate Professor at Hasselt University, Belgium. She works in the areas of participatory design, spatial transformation processes and human-computer interaction. She is part of the research projects Traders and Critical Heritage. She designed the participatory mapping tool MAP-it (www.map-it.be) and is co-founder of Social Spaces (www.socialspaces.be).

Roel De Ridder is a researcher and a tutor at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts, Hasselt University, Belgium. He is also a lecturer in architectural theory and a tutor at the Faculty of Architecture at KU Leuven (in Brussels and Ghent). He attained a doctoral degree, on The Public Performance of the Parish Church, at Hasselt University (2013). His research focuses on supporting municipalities and church boards in developing and implementing policies and new architectural schemes regarding the future of church buildings. Since 2012, De Ridder has been artistic director of the architecture organisation Architectuurwijzer vzw (Hasselt, Belgium).