Dear colleagues,
Prof. Henry Sanoff is working for nearly 50 years on participatory
design. He is prominent in the area of architectural and community
design, distinguished professor, founder of Environmental Design
Research Association (EDRA). He has published extensively on this
topic. You can access publications on Amazon.com or in your
libraries, and his bio on the Web. By the way, Henry Sanoff worked
for some time in Berkeley in close cooperation with Christopher
Alexander. Prof. Sanoff chose to go into a more practical and applied
direction and developed a whole new field, as well as a doctoral
program on Community Design at North Carolina State University at Raleigh.
EDRA has a network on participation. You can access it through the
EDRA website.
Unfortunately, there is more talk and good intentions than real
dedication to participatory design. A major problem is the ensuing
politics when working with stakeholders, the necessity to develop
special skills, difficult logistics, and a host of other
difficulties. It is much easier to go top-down and propose a design
to the Board of Trustees for approval. And often that is the only way
to make the design fee in reasonable time.
Ken is right that there is a lot of material on participation in the
field of management. Citizen participation (participatory management,
planning, and design) was a fashionable topic in the late 1960's and
1970's. After that, the fervor subsided. In the last decade there is
an increased interest, this time in Education, with the code words
Participatory Action Research. It is somewhat different, but in the
long run it boils doen to social design, although no one wants to
call it this way.
Best,
Lubomir
Lubomir Popov, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Interior Design Program
School of Family and Consumer Sciences
309 Johnston Hall
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH 43403-0059
phone: (419) 372-7935
fax: (419) 372-7854
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