Thinging with the past: co-designing a slow road network by mediating between the historical landscape and the design space

Abstract

In this article, we put forward the importance of engaging with the past in co-design projects. We argue that such an engagement helps situate and contextualise design projects, especially by tackling pre-existing assumptions and previous design legacies. In doing so, we reflect on the experience of setting up a project to explore and reactivate a neglected infrastructure of slow roads as a network of potential in sustainable mobility transition. We start by considering slow roads in relation to two design perspectives on thinging. First, by understanding thinging in the historical landscape as an agency of things to ‘design over time’, we explore how road infrastructures enact previous design models. Second, by looking at thinging as an approach of gathering and confronting heterogeneous perspectives in a design project, we engage with slow roads as socio-material assemblies that evolve in the design space over time. By revisiting the case study, we connect these two perspectives to propose thinging as a design approach that mediates between the historical landscape and the design space. In the discussion, we reflect on the methodology of the case to outline co-design strategies that aim to operationalise this approach of ‘thinging with the past’.