Workshop at the PUARL Symposium
Throughout our 14 years of design practice we strive to design sustainable, whole environments together with the people who are going to use and live at these places. We started by working with landscape architecture and permaculture design, assisting eco-villages and projects. Then we developed approaches influenced by design thinking and community organizing and assisted institutions in design focused change processes. Pattern languages are a part of our Institutes everyday practice. In the last years we had the opportunity to assist communities in facing the challenge of their future in a time of demographic change and drastic financial cuts in infrastructure.
Working with people in participatory, collaborative design processes was always at the heart of our work. We often were intrigued by seeing personal, spacial and societal transformations as part of an unfolding interconnected emerging process. Confronted with linear and control oriented models of the design processes and methodologies we continuously tried to understand the nature of processes which are alive and what we as designers, facilitators and guides could do to foster them.
In this workshop we would like to focus on very concrete, practical questions, as how to initiate a participatory design process, how to prepare for its uncertainties and how to hold the process without limiting it in its potential. We will share and explore experiences and stories from our work and from the contributions of the attendees.
