Engaging public voice in big data society : an on-line participatory design experiment.

Abstract

Should the design of architecture be solely in control by architects? Should we trust the public to let them design with us? These are the core discussion revolves around participatory design, a design approach involves public effort. In theory, this democratic process should results a more responsive and suitable project for users. Although the concept of participatory design works well in theory, but there are constrains that stopped itself from wider application. How can we collect large amount of ideas that can directly lead to a design solution? Will the result have any advantage compare to traditional design process? Building upon historic precedents, my thesis proposes an on-line participatory platform, a new computational tool that allows large number of participants participate into the design process. Each user's desire can be translated into a set of data that represents their preferences on architecture. Then, to extract common patterns from data pool to compute result. The final goal is to calculate an optimized design that will suit most users' desire. Will the public like what they designed collectively? The result will spark an interesting discussion.