Generativity Revisited. Participatory Design for Self-Organization in Communities

Abstract

Societal trends, such as the governmental withdrawal from the public realm, increasingly motivates communities to self-organize in taking care of it. As a result, designers have explored the concept of 'generativity' as a quality of design that supports communities in questioning, supporting and giving form to self-organization in the public realm. Nonetheless, a thorough investigation of how to enable generativity in the context of community-based participatory design (PD) is lacking. When designers give form to generativity, they intend to allow people to 'self-organize' by transforming and using infrastructures through and for debating and creating public matters, without assistance from the infrastructure's original designers. While design for informatics defines generativity with a focus on ‘self’-organized processes, we conclude that generativity in the context of designing for the complex politics of the public realm is a quality that mainly supports communities' ‘co’-organization. We describe the generative quality of design in the community project Betty's Garden and discuss how the specific roles and capabilities that were developed by the community and by us as researchers contributed to this quality.

Keywords:

• participatory design
• design research
• case study
• design theory
• user participation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katrien Dreessen

Katrien Dreessen is a researcher at the Inter-Actions research unit and teacher at LUCA, School of Arts in Genk. She is currently finishing her PhD research on engaging non-expert users in long-term design processes taking place within open spaces (i.e. Fablab and Living Labs).

Liesbeth Huybrechts

Liesbeth Huybrechts is Associate Professor involved in the research group Arck, Hasselt University and Living Lab The Other Market, a space for reflection and action on the future of work. She works on and educational projects related to participatory design, collectivity and commons in city-making and spatial transformation processes.

Jessica Schoffelen

Jessica Schoffelen (PhD) researches participatory and open (design) processes. She lectured on arts and design research and Interaction Design. She coordinated the FP7 Marie Curie training project TRADERS concerning participation in public space. Currently, she researches participation and citizenship within the research group Inclusive Society (UC Leuven-Limburg).