Caresets and the Experimental Public Co-Design of Tomorrow
Name
aydemir-denizay-sm-sdm-2025-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
Size
978.07 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3b5ce123b9e490e43df2f94c022880ce
Author(s)
Aydemir, Deniz
Advisor(s)
Zardini, Gioele
Duarte de Araújo Silva, Fábio
Date Issued
September 2025
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Participatory planning can help cities make better policy and planning decisions. An effective participatory planning framework must represent complex urban systems (compositional), compute Pareto-optimal solutions (computational), and incorporate residents into the decision-making process (collaborative).
We build a mathematical language using partially ordered sets to formally describe care in three forms: preference, ethics, and design. We then create a compositional, computational, and collaborative framework for participatory planning called the Experimental Public Co-Design of Tomorrow (EPCODOT). This framework adapts monotone co-design to work with our language of care and extends the approach with a collaborative interface. We demonstrate EPCODOT's capabilities first by modeling an MIT Senseable City Lab research project on trade-offs between data privacy and urban well-being, and then by modeling its potential application with a real public project in Durham, North Carolina. We provide a software prototype at epcodot.com.
This work develops two interconnected contributions: a mathematical language of care connecting applied category theory, decision theory, and ethics; and EPCODOT, a software tool enabling participatory planning for researchers, communities, and cities. Future work should pursue four directions: exploring additional category-theoretic structures within the mathematical language, formalizing connections to social choice and decision theory, testing EPCODOT directly with communities, and enhancing the computational capabilities of the framework's monotone co-design adaptation.
MIT Department
System Design and Management Program.
Terms of Use
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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