Generativity revisited. Participatory Design for self-organisation in communities

Abstract

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. Nonetheless, a thorough investigation of how to enable generativity in the context of community-based participatory design (PD) is lacking. When designers give form to generativity, they intend to allow people to 'self-organize' by transforming and using infrastructures through and for debating and creating public matters, without assistance from the infrastructure's original designers. While design for informatics defines generativity with a focus on ‘self’-organized processes, we conclude that generativity in the context of designing for the complex politics of the public realm is a quality that mainly supports communities' ‘co’-organization. We describe the generative quality of design in the community project Betty's Garden and discuss how the specific roles and capabilities that were developed by the community and by us as researchers contributed to this quality.