Architecture as participation
Introduction
Participatory design (also known as cooperative design) is an approach to designing by actively engaging all parties involved (employees, partners, customers, citizens, end users) in order to help ensure that the designed product fits their needs and can be used.
Participatory design is in itself a process of expanding information, learning and collective agreements. The way the process is developed is as important as the design results achieved.
The term is used in different fields of software design, urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, sustainability, graphic design, planning or even medicine as a way of creating environments that are more sensitive and appropriate to its inhabitants, users' cultural, emotional, spiritual and, in turn, practical needs. It has been used in many environments and at various scales. Participatory design is an approach that focuses on design processes and procedures and is not a design style. For some, this approach has a political dimension of empowerment and democratization. For others, it is seen as a way to abrogate designers' responsibility for design and innovation.
In several Scandinavian countries in the 1960s and 1970s, it was based on work with unions, and its offspring also included action research and the Socio-Technical System[1].
Design is an activity that historically arises when human beings need to imagine what the objects they require in their daily lives—utensils, furniture, vehicles, buildings, etc.—may be like at a time prior to their creation, that is, when the actions of prefiguring and building are carried out separately, even by different people.
Definition
Participatory design participants (putative, potential or future) are invited to cooperate with designers, researchers and developers during the innovation process. Potentially, they will participate in several stages of an innovation process: their participation during initial problem exploration and problem, they help to define both the problem and focus ideas for a solution, and during development, they help to evaluate proposed solutions.
It is essential to achieve positive results to establish the "from where" we intend to look at the exercise of design and participatory planning, since it is not about evaluating and analyzing a relatively new practice, but rather about achieving a political and cultural framework, of the encounter between traditional practices in the process of occupation of the territory developed by large population groups and some ways of approaching developed by groups of professionals who have been accompanying specific social processes (López, 2008, p.28).