Liesbeth Huybrechts

• Hasselt University

This forum showcases emerging approaches, new ideas, and promising pathways that draw attention to the diverse, interdisciplinary, and impactful work of global scholars to advance dialogue in the field on how we can best contribute to climate action. --- Robert Soden, Vishal Sharma, Matthew Louis Mauriello, and Nicola J. Bidwell, Editors

This paper explores the incorporation in architectural education of everyday eating practices as a pedagogical approach. By involving architecture students in cooking, eating, and digesting together, the study seeks to move beyond conventional architectural training. Through a focus on eating, this approach aims to emphasize personal experiences as...

Participatory Design (PD) is increasingly interested in the repair process, motivated by the curiosity to articulate a more caring and relational attitude toward our socioecological environment. However, placing ‘repair’ centrally in PD is difficult, since the latter has been traditionally focused on ‘making together’ and less on repairing what was...

Planning processes often cause tensions between institutions and citizens because the local knowledge and values of the citizens are not included in the decision-making process, which can cause mistrust. This article builds on an ongoing PhD research that explores the potential of experiential evaluation as an alternative and experimental approach...

Spatial densification is an ongoing process in most cities today, but has an uneasy relation with the liveability of our environments. In this article, we approach this uneasy relationship between densification and liveability as a ‘matter of scales’ and work consciously with the tensions which arise, such as a lack of communication and mistrust. W...

Today, participatory design (PD) has an increasing focus on sustainable urban futures. Given the complexity of designing with and for urban sustainability, PD in this context often takes place in long-term processes which involve evolving networks of actors operating from different perspectives on this issue. This paper highlights the need for coll...

In this article, we put forward the importance of engaging with the past in co-design projects. We argue that such an engagement helps situate and contextualise design projects, especially by tackling pre-existing assumptions and previous design legacies. In doing so, we reflect on the experience of setting up a project to explore and reactivate a...

In participatory design (PD) processes driven by institutions, designers struggle in reaching out to silent and/or silenced human and more-than-human voices within local communities. This can in a long run contribute to polarisation in the design process. This paper explores how to reimagine designing with communities beyond polarisation, by rethin...

The book titled The Collaborative Economy in Action: European Perspectives is one of the important outcomes of the COST Action CA16121, From Sharing to Caring: Examining the Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy (short name: Sharing and Caring; sharingandcaring.eu) that was active between March 2017 and September 2021. The Action was...

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....

The increasing polarization of sustainability debates has enhanced the need for designers to re-engage with the politics of sustainable futures. This paper explores these debates in Flemish suburban dwelling contexts, where sustainable development strategies such as densification and depaving trigger conflict between dwellers, policy-makers, design...

In this article, we argue that an engagement with the uses of the past in the design space can support better situated participatory design approaches in the context of spatial development. We start from a case study where we explored how the redevelopment of a post-industrial site affected the local actors and their existing dynamics. By reflectin...

This article explores 'dialectical design dialogues' as an approach to engage with ethics in everyday urban planning contexts. It starts from Paulo Freire's pedagogical view (1970/2017), in which dialogues imply the establishment of a horizontal relation between professionals and amateurs, in order to understand, question and imagine things in ever...

When defining participation in urban renewal projects in a political sense, this concept implies the challenging of power relations in each of its dimensions while addressing the need for knowledge, action and consciousness. Knowledge is defined as a resource which affects observable decision making. Action looks at who is involved in the productio...

In this paper we draw upon the articles included in this special issue to question how to re-politicise co-design and participatory design (PD). Many authors in these fields have recently made a plea to re-engage with ‘big issues’ as a way to address this concern. At the same time, there is an increased attention into the micro-politics of the rela...

Today’s environmental emergency requires specific efforts in terms of thinking/acting in designing. The consequences of anthropocentric ways of producing, consuming and living are becoming painfully clear. Design played (and often still plays) a role in this, and therefore has in many ways contributed to feed this anthropocentric mindset, consideri...

The issue of design and democracy is an urgent and rather controversial one. Democracy has always been a core theme in design research, but in the past years it has shifted in meaning. The current discourse in design research that has been working in a participatory way on common issues in given local contexts, has developed an enhanced focus on re...

This article starts from the hypothesis that design can contribute to a transition towards a more sustainable future for our cities if it supports work and living environments to 'collaborate' in making this future. The literature section discusses how work environments are increasingly disconnected from their surrounding living environments and th...

This article explores the relations between participatory design (PD) and critical heritage studies (CHS) in the context of urban planning and development. In searching for a PD approach which can critically address the role of heritage in urban development, it problematizes the focus on economic viability in urban renewal practices and the lack of...

In this chapter, the authors use actor-network theory (ANT) to explore the relations between uncertainties in co-design processes and the quality of participation. To do so, the authors investigate Latour's discussion uncertainties in relation to social processes: the nature of actors, actions, objects, facts/matters of concern, and the study of th...

Half a century of experiments in participatory spatial planning make clear that participatory planning and (political) decision making are in a fuzzy relationship, with both aspiring to different goals, thriving in different conditions and adhering to different rationales. This paper adopts the argument that one way out of this fuzziness is to appr...

Designers are increasingly involved in designing alternative futures for their cities, together with or self-organized by citizens. This article discusses the fact that (groups of) citizens often lack the support or negotiation power to engage in or sustain parts of these complex design processes. Therefore the “capabilities” of these citizens to c...

This paper explores how the concept of autonomous design, as proposed by Arturo Escobar (2012, 2017a, 2017b) and inspired by the global South, can inform socially engaged design practices in the North. The concept of autonomy is approached from a southern perspective, not (only) from a geographical standpoint, but in understanding autonomous design...

This article discusses the difficult task of Participatory Design (PD) to design for/with the political dimension of work, such as the work environments' care for inclusion of different groups. It first describes PD's role through time in giving form to this political dimension after the crisis of Fordism and detects some challenges PD is confronte...

The proposal¹ presents a situated action that exhibits a Participatory Design project called "Everyone shares in Hasselt". It discusses the role of PD in contemplating and articulating the political potential of spatial commoning. It does this by exploring the relation between how communities organise themselves around their common concerns, goods...

'WegenWerken' (RoadWorks) is an ongoing collaboration between multiple stakeholders, focused on the role of soft connections in the city of Genk (Belgium) and guided by the approach of participatory design (PD). Through this project, we engaged with different research and design activities on macro-(city- and region-wide and reflective) and micro-...

This workshop¹ aims to provide insight in and research collaboratively with the participants how Hannah Arendt's philosophy can contribute to the discussion about `Participatory Design and Democracy'. The Workshop addresses and discusses how Arendt's understanding of democracy in her book The Human Condition [1] can support design research in quest...

Sharing design decisions between designers and the people we design for and with, is a common aim in participatory design (PD). When working with people with dementia this rarely happens in explicit ways. Design decisions implicitly emerge from the relationships designers build with people with dementia. We argue that designers should value this re...

Designing participation over time is a challenge that is regularly discussed in the fields of Participatory Design (PD) and Codesign. This paper describes two living labs-cases concerned with designing IT during long-term engagements with communities. Both labs aim to enable participatory exchanges after the designer leaves and are thus confronted...

Sharing documentation is part of many good practices that engage participants on a long-term base. Well-known are the professional fields of Open Source Software, Open Hardware and Open Innovation, as well as academic research. At its core, documentation is about transferring information beyond one specific project team, site or time frame. We spec...

In this introductory article to the special issue ‘Co-Design and the public realm’, we discuss a common interest in how meso- and macro-political institutional contexts frame and are informed by Participatory Design (PD) and Co-Design processes. We argue that a unilateral focus within PD and Co-Design on the micro-political scale of fieldwork obscu...

This paper discusses counterfactual scripting to critically inquire and give form to Participatory Design (PD) processes in an age of ubiquitous participation. In its often superficial application in various societal domains, the processes and instruments for participation are often cut loose from their political context. The stories of what has ha...

Shortly after the first 47 PhDs in art and design were defended in the Flemish Universities, it became clear that the range of PhDs is too broad to be organised and evaluated by one single model (Crombez 2015). The idea of doctorateness in art and design fi elds (Dunin-Woyseth and Nilsson 2012) has in Flanders been largely inspired by the ideal of...

This paper stresses the need for more research in the field of Participatory Design (PD) and in particular into how to design Health Information Technology (HIT) together with care providers and -receivers in multicultural settings. We contribute to this research by describing a case study, the 'Health-Cultures' project, in which we designed HIT fo...

In de afgelopen jaren is er veel geschreven over burgerparticipatie in de stad. Via kleinschalige initiatieven van onderuit zouden burgers, activisten maar ook kunstenaars en designers een alternatieve stadsomgeving ontwerpen waarin gezamenlijkheid en collectieve betrokkenheid centraal staan. Deze bijdrage beargumenteert aan de hand van een casus u...

This paper discusses counterfactual scripting as a framework to critically inquire and give form to design decisions in Participatory Design (PD) processes. The stories of what has happened in a design process are often told in a clear storyline that develops logically via different design moves towards a well-defined plot. Counterfactual scripting...

What are your capabilities? How do you imagine a workstation where you can apply these capabilities? Where is it situated? These are some of the questions addressed by De Andere Markt (DAM), a Living Lab in the city of Genk. Via the Participatory Design (PD) of semi-fictional 'workstations', we research and design the future of work together with l...

The field of Strategic Design supports designers in researching and designing for the complexity of today’s cities by embracing the idea of strategic dialogue, in which designers align with different actors and their interests. In this article, we discuss how democratic dialogues – foregrounded in the Participatory Design (PD) tradition – play a ro...

At the HKDI Desis Lab ‘open design’ is a way to approach a complex design context such as design for healthcare, residential communities, politics, work, homelessness etc. wherein both humans as well as artefacts are involved (Latour, 2005; Akrich, 1992; Ehn, 2008). The lab’s approach is closely related to how openness is approached in Participator...

In this paper, we will be discussing how visualisations can facilitate participatory processes by way of conveying issues of public concern as ‘things’. In the line of Latour’s plea to ‘make things public’, visualisations can be purposefully designed to trigger and encourage public debates concerning a wide range of issues. For this, we explore how...

div class="page" title="Page 1"> The aim of the Unfolding Participation workshop is to outline an agenda for the next 10 years of participatory design (PD) and participatory human computer interaction (HCI) research. We will do that through a double strategy: 1) by critically interrogating the concept of participation ( unfolding the concept itsel...

In this article the authors use Actor-Network Theory ANT to explore the relationship between uncertainties in co-design processes and the quality of participation. They investigate discussion of uncertainties in social processes concerning the nature of actors, actions, objects, facts/matters of concern and the study of the social. To discuss uncer...

This paper evaluates how the ‘thick’ documentation format Make-and-tell supports generative participation in a sustainable design project ‘Haspenwood’. Generative participation refers to the possibility for participants to elaborate on the design after project completion. We frame thick documentation as representing the immaterial backstory of a pr...

This article describes how sharing documentation of complex participatory projects can contribute to end-user development. With complex participatory projects we refer to projects combining the development of software and hardware in a cultural, social or health context with groups of participants. In this paper we specifically analysed projects th...

In this article the authors use Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to explore the relationship between uncertainties in co-design processes and the quality of participation. They investigate discussion of uncertainties in social processes concerning the nature of actors, actions, objects, facts/matters of concern and the study of the social. To discuss unc...

This paper departs from the idea that participatory design workshops take on the form of exchanges of viewpoints, wherein none of the involved designers, participants or objects completely define the process of exchange and its outcomes. This raises the question how this multidirectional process can still be moderated. We propose that designers tak...

This paper critically looks at the role of people with dementia (and their network) when involved in a participatory design (PD) process and the role of designers when involving a person with dementia (and their network). Two participatory projects (ATOM and Dementia Lab) were analyzed and challenges in doing PD together with people with dementia a...

This paper evaluates how the 'thick' documentation format Make-and-tell supports generative participation in a sustainable design project 'Haspenwood'. Generative participation refers to the possibility for participants to elaborate on the design after project completion. We frame thick documentation as representing the immaterial backstory of a pr...

The role of making may seem self-evident in a design context. However, in developing an educational design research course at the [institute name], we experienced that when design and research are intertwined, students tend to lose their focus on making. Therefore, this paper reflects on a research trajectory that explores how to support students i...

In this paper we reflect on MAP-it: a participatory mapping method and toolkit, containing a map, sticker sheets, a scenario, etc. It enables designers to moderate participatory design processes through workshops in which people from different backgrounds collaboratively reflect on and set up new projects. In several test mappings during our resear...

Changes in media production, sharing, distribution and consumption are often defined in dichotomies. This is obvious when we look at the television landscape. Traditional television is often perceived as mainstream media whereas user generated networked video services like YouTube as a critical counter-force where "users" are finally able to expres...

We don't always realize that the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds in our daily life are becoming increasingly sketchy, even invisible. We often realize that a chat session is possible thanks to a computer network. But it is less obvious that our city, our living room or even our food, in addition to Internet traffic, depend on thi...