Co-designing the project problem. Design participation at the local level and the use of linkography as a means to study design interactions

Abstract

During the last decade, a social demand has arisen in Chile, regarding the inclusion of citizen participation in city and territory production processes. This demand has not been thoroughly met so far by the State, still in the process of developing legal and methodological frameworks consistent with citizenry demands.

Among the obstacles to an effective, inclusive and binding design participation we find variables of institutional and procedural kind. The insufficient relationship between design processes and the investment projects assessment system, stands out among those variables.

An example of this weak linkage is that in most territorial and urban development projects, participatory spaces are programmed within the design stage, when most important decisions regarding program, site and budget have already been made.

Our work approaches this problem through the development of a participation experience in the design of public spaces at the local scale in the village of Alhué. This project emphasized two main issues. On the one hand, co-designing the project problem, understood as a space of possibility for relating political and procedural issues with aesthetic and functional ones. On the other hand, the possibility of qualitatively assessing the design interaction between experts and non-experts, just as between institutional representatives and community members.

The methodological proposal was based upon a reverse analysis of the design problem and in protocol analysis, specifically through the linkography method. Results suggest that focusing on discussing the design problem allowed for dynamics of complementarity among participants -instead of conflict- and gave legitimacy to the reference project images devised by the municipal team, and also to the prioritization of projects.