Together we make places: Designing connections in urban space

Place-making initiatives have gained momentum in recent years to establish stronger urban communities. Through place-making, people attach meaning to spaces and they become places. While place-making initiatives have traditionally been designed and implemented from top-down, more and more scholars call for a participatory and bottom-up approach, for place-making to realise its full potential in creating strong neighbourhood communities. In this context, the thesis explored how the knowledge from Participatory Design and place-making may confluence to move from spaces to places in a more inclusive and community-driven way. The main research question was: How can Participatory Design facilitate place-making in urban settings across physical space, social connections, and institutional support? This thesis presents a framework for participatory place-making, build from place-making and Participatory Design literature and evaluated using six participatory place-making interventions that were designed, implemented, and evaluated in neighbourhoods in The Hague, Rotterdam, and Cork (Ireland). The framework contains five principles (emergent, empowering, inclusive, playful, reflective) that should guide the design of participatory place-making interventions and is complemented with five guidelines to design for participatory place-making.System Engineerin

It’s in the social network: The Social Neighbourhood model to unravel local social structures for liveable and safe neighbourhoods

Fast growth of cities decreases the quality of life in these places. In response, Municipalities install policies aiming to improve local livability. While literature suggests social structures to have a defining impact on policy effectiveness, current evaluation metrics are not able to take this into account. This paper presents the Social Neighbourhood model, an agent-based model used to simulate and explore how livability changes in a neighbourhood given various social structures and policies. The model is applied to a neighbourhood in The Hague, Netherlands. The main result of the modelling experiments is that social structures have a very strong influence on whether or not a policy to improve livability is effective. Three hypotheses, concerning this relationship between social structures, livability, and policy interventions are drawn up as a starting point for future research.System Engineerin

Empowering community volunteers through matchmaking services

In Rotterdam, the participatory turn has spurred various bottom-up communities around public parks. These communities aim to take care of the parks in their neighbourhood and search for ways to demonstrate the societal value of their initiative. The current work explores how digital matchmaking services can strengthen community relationships. A research-through-design approach is applied to identify the main barriers hindering community participation. The final design Park Makers uses both Citizen-to-Activity matching and Citizen-to-Citizen matching as ways to engage citizens in the community. The corresponding research demonstrates that connecting park users (or better: future volunteers) with another citizen or activity matching their personal interest fosters community engagement. From this point of view, it might be interesting to focus further research on the potential value of other matchmaking principles, or even other services, for bottom-up citizen communities.System EngineeringDesign Conceptualization and Communicatio

Location-based Information Sharing for Neighbourhood Participation

Policy makers, designers, and researchers are currently investigating different types of citizen initiatives to support information sharing. Contemporary information sharing initiatives are often not sustained because they are not open for all citizens to participate and do not provide relevant information. This paper explores how citizens can share information about their own neighbourhoods that is relevant for them and easy to access. Four participatory design workshops were organised to explore tacit knowledge and latent needs of citizens in a specific neighbourhood in The Hague. Results show that location-based information sharing support citizens to explore new things about the neighbourhood. Future research will focus on how this can be sustained over a longer period of time.System Engineerin

Exploring design guidelines for fostering citizen engagement through information sharing: Local playgrounds in The Hague

Citizens’ engagement in their neighbourhood community is pivotal for cities to effectively deal with future transitions. Knowing what is going on and having access to the neighbourhood network are important conditions for this. Although prior research has studied ways to foster information sharing between citizens, the underlying assumptions and design choices are often not made explicit. This research identifies design guidelines for playgrounds: physical and virtual spaces where citizens can exchange information about their neighbourhood. A focus group, a workshop and a case study of an existing playground design were performed in The Hague, NL, the context of this research. A set of eight guidelines was identified, covering how to select playground locations, which information to include, and how to design the interaction between citizens. These guidelines inform designers how to create urban playgrounds for citizens to meet, interact, and collaborate to create engaged communities.System EngineeringTransport and Logistic

Exploring Requirements for Joint Information Sharing in Neighbourhoods: Local Playgrounds in The Hague

Resilient communities are an important prerequisite to reach urban resilience. In such communities, citizens need to be able to participate for improving liveability and safety of their environment. The playable city, where participation is key, provides the environment for this process to unfold. This paper researches requirements for the design of playgrounds: environments for open interaction and collaboration, as part of the playable city. Two workshops were organised in two neighbourhoods in The Hague to explore specific citizen preferences for playground design. Neighbourhood locations and the type of information citizens would like to discover, share, and create are identified, in particular with respect to healthcare, safety and social engagement. The implications of these requirements are presented and discussed with design options which exemplify how playgrounds in the city enable joined information sharing, creation, interaction, and collaboration.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.System Engineerin

Designing for meaningful social interaction in digital serious games

Digital serious games have shown to be effective in promoting citizen engagement and social interaction. The reasons for their success are, however, unknown. This paper proposes design recommendations to support designers of serious games for meaningful social interaction, based on player preferences, needs and desires, based on literature study and a case study for which a location-based game framework was designed, developed and evaluated. The case study with and for children/teenagers in Rotterdam focussed on the design of challenges by the children/teenagers for meaningful interaction with their environment, and the strengthening of their engagement with their own neighbourhood. The paper focuses specifically on: 1) if and when meaningful social interaction occurred during game play, how it occurred, and with which impact, and 2) the design choices/features that contributed to (the experience of) meaningful social interaction. On the basis of these results and the literature this paper proposes design recommendations to support designers of serious games for meaningful social interaction, taking not only the current players’ needs and desires into account but also those of future players.System Engineerin

Location-based challenges for playful neighbourhood exploration

Location-based activities can challenge citizens to explore their neighbourhood in new playful ways. This paper presents a classification of such playful activities based on the literature and experience gained (1) in co-creation sessions and (2) gameplay for neighbourhood exploration with citizens in the Hague. The location-based game designed for this purpose encouraged neighbourhood exploration and social interaction that went beyond the everyday normal. Results showed that citizens are specifically interested in activities that allow them to discover new information about, and places in, their neighbourhood when these are related to their own life. The results of this paper provide new knowledge on game design to inform designers on which type of interactions and activities foster neighbourhood exploration and social interaction.System Engineerin

The power of stories: A framework to orchestrate reflection in urban storytelling to form stronger communities

This paper focuses on the particular power of storytelling to foster reflection and connections between people in urban life. In fact, the core principles and mechanisms for public storytelling to achieve this have yet to be made explicit. This gap is addressed by introducing a novel reflective storytelling framework that unveils the underlying principles of fostering reflection and connection through public storytelling. The framework is proposed on the basis of the literature and its appropriateness is explored in a case study in the Hague (the Netherlands) with particular focus on the influence of content and form on successfully orchestrating reflective storytelling. The impact of citizen stories on the creation of new and stronger social ties, as well as challenges, tensions, and opportunities are discussed. These results inform researchers, urban planners, and other city practitioners on how to design effective storytelling initiatives to strengthen ties in urban communities.System EngineeringTransport and Logistic

Participatory Design Going Digital: Challenges and Opportunities for Distributed Place-Making

COVID-19 has urged researchers to explore new options for distributed participatory design, as physical meetings and workshops became unfeasible. This situation posed new challenges but also opportunities, in particular with respect to engagement and inclusion. This paper focuses on distributed PD with Irish teenagers to support place-making during this period: to build relationships with each other and the community. In a two-week online summer school, teenagers explored a concern or highlighted a unique aspect of their local community and designed digital artworks in response. Activities and materials were designed to support reflection, empowerment, inclusiveness, emergence, and playfulness for participatory place-making. Analysis of the summer school provides insights and guidance on the design of online PD for engaging experiences, especially in the context of place-making.System Engineerin