Participatory design discourse

Richard Perron

Assistant Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Participatory strategies for placemaking are in themselves vehicles of assemblage, ways, means and tools for acts of creativity to emerge. Placemaking must engage the critical power of architectural language in the project of social transformation linking symbolic meaning to existing contexts. Designers must seek wider forms of contact, and architectureÍs symbolic systems must be made more accessible to the public that is affected. This means that in an on-line setting the acts of deliberate engagement should go beyond the limitations of e-mail, and other popular net based communication strategies (chat rooms, digital fora, muds etc.), facilitating broader exchanges of both verbal and non-verbal forms of representation. In the long run it become a means of deconstructing current design strategies that tend to limit discourse and fracture debate. This is however more than a technological issue but an issue of when and how community participation in design settings can take place.



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