Evaluating Approaches to Participation in Design: The Participants' Perspective.

Abstract

Landscape architects and other designers rely on users for feedback about their needs, concerns, and reactions to potential solutions. While these well-intended efforts often fail to meet their goals, evaluations of the effectiveness of design participation from the participants’ perspective is lacking. Drawing on the Reasonable Person Model as a conceptual framework, the three studies reported here evaluated participants’ understanding of design options, engagement, and sense of meaningful participation. The first two studies, in the context of a design project for nature trails at a medical campus in Midwest U.S., used design sessions and a photoquestionnaire. The third study followed a more systematic approach to compare the effectiveness of different types of design drawings.

Participants found the design sessions engaging and their input meaningful. However, the differences in understandability for the different designs are attributable to presentation format, organization, and design graphics. Furthermore, the more difficulty participants had understanding the design presentation, the less they liked the design option presented. This study also found that the photoquestionnaire compared favorably to the design presentations.

The photoquestionnaire, the focus of the second study, showed that this approach performed particularly well in promoting a sense of meaningful participation for the participating visitors and employees. It also revealed the importance of offering multiple avenues for people to express their concerns so they feel that they have been heard.

The third study found photorealistic and perspective drawings to be more understandable and engaging and to promote greater confidence in discussing the design than plans and sections. Notably, some plans and sections, characterized as simple, neat, coherent, legible, and using colors that matched common perceptions, performed better than some photorealistic and perspective drawings. Simplification in the representation of design features also enhanced understandability in some cases.

This research reveals ways designers can facilitate a participation process that meets the cognitive and psychological needs of participants and leads to reliable, useful feedback. It empowers designers by helping them see they can make a difference in creating an effective participation process.