Participatory Design: the Collective Configuration of Everyday Life
To continue the last week's question I raised on how architects engage with society in a meaningful way without becoming a commodity, I would like to say more about the participatory approach as a response to this question.
I understand everyday life analogically as the world of experience in phenomenology. It is foregrounded with embodied practices and customs, premised on convictions and faith, formulated as habitual and cultural aspects of human existence.
The fabric of life is uneven. Not everything protrudes in a uniform way. Various matters of concern obtrude from everyday life and are captured by our conscious considerations while the non-obtrusive textures remain as a set of possibilities deemed as the practices of everyday life.
The possibilities are limited by historical and spatial horizons; they hinge on the rootedness in our given circumstances. The totality of the possible form one's finite existential horizons.
Human existence is about making decisions that configure the fabric of life. It is also to overlay new decisions based on previous ones so that the fabric of life is constantly refigured. In making decisions the possibilities are actualized into realities. Thus human existence, in Michael Marder's interpretation of Heidegger, is "the dialectic of the potential and actual."
Participatory design is the organization of finite possibilities, Jeremy Till coined as the organization of hope or anticipation. By framing, orientating, and suggesting the realm of possibilities, designers deliminate the field where new figures of life could be sketched out from the oftentimes tacit areas of everyday life.
Participation itself is the collective making of a figure of life. Participants let the figure rise from the bottom up but within the field that is pre-oriented by designers. Therefore, through participatory design, designers and users collectively articulate new figures of life.
Vincent, one thing that caught my attention was when you said, "Human existence is about making decisions that configure the fabric of life. It is also to overlay new decisions based on previous ones so that the fabric of life is constantly refigured. In making decisions the possibilities are actualized into realities." I couldn't agree more on that and in my opinion, human life is the perfect example of how life itself change course, events, and trajectories. Science and architecture, physics and theory, all have challenged the way we think about life. Facts, rationalism, and optimism are always colliding with each other in our daily lives but then again how do we help the world move forward if we don't modify its fabric, how do we reshape society through making of spaces that are reconfigured but still help us feel everything we want to experience whether it is love or happiness? For some it is hard, for others it is easy, but then the foundation, the values, the commonalities we share are bounds to change gradually but should those things change as well, or should they be maintained by restraining ourselves from touching things that shouldn't be touched and creating barriers that shouldn't exist? It is a continuous discussion with no answers that are right but then again it is a discussion that is needed to be had by us all. Therefore as you highlighted, participatory design can help us reclaim the spaces we want, and reshape the kind of society we want to live in, but "we" itself shouldn't be used because it is not an inclusive word, it only target one part and leave the other part on its own. Design should aim to address, reflect upon, and offer opportunities to be inclusive, not just participatory.
ReplyDeleteYou are right, when speaking about "we," one wonders to which class, gender, race, nationality do ‘we’ belong? I think despite political divisions, "we" share the basic fact that we have to configure life together with others—whatever belongs to the self inherently receives supports from the other.
Delete