Course Syllabus

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Columbia GSAPP

Spring 2023

 

ARCH 6511-1

Participatory Design from the Barrio to the Board Room (Draft)

Fridays 11am-1pm

Avery 409

 

Bankworkers Association Game.png

Computers in Context, dir. Jim Mayer, 1986.

Bank workers play an association game, Buskerud, Norway.

 

 

 

 

 

Samuel Stewart-Halevy

ss5184@columbia.edu

 

 

Overview

We now encounter Participatory Design everywhere we look. The strategy of involving “community members,” office workers, and other stakeholders in the design of the spaces where they live and work can be found behind the production of just about any building, product or masterplan. Participatory Design marks a break with conventional architectural practices because it transfers its tools from architects to everyday users. This substitution of expertise and distribution of creativity has long marked a vanishing point for the architectural profession among those who understand design as a form of politics writ small. It also represents a broad paradigm for service work in the present day, where workers are asked to bear the responsibility of organizing their schedules, benefits, and much else, and consumers are integrated into ever accelerating cycles of innovation.

This seminar follows the intersecting practices and discourses of Participatory Design as they took shape across the realms of social housing, community planning, workplace design, and international development since the 1960s. Drawing on a wide range of interconnected examples, first-hand accounts, and secondary literature, we will ask, how, why, and where did Participatory Design’s strategies of elicitation take hold in this period and what skills did they displace? What common artifacts can be discerned across the disparate settings of neighborhood planning charrettes and white-collar brainstorms and what are the pragmatics of these situations? If Participatory Design has often been theorized by its proponents as a marginal, alternative and “font line” practice, how has its spread and formatting reconfigured the field of social engagement in the present day and what other paths might it have taken?   

 

Structure

The semester opens with a workshop on selected programs and manifestoes of Participatory Design as they have been advanced since the 1960s and the historiographical limits of studying participation as a vanguardist form.  From there we will turn to recent scholarship by architectural historians on the nexus of architecture, design and the social sciences in the postwar period, from which many participatory design methods have emerged.  We will also examine the parallel development of participation as a managerial technique in the same period drawing upon accounts from Science and Technology Studies.  From there we will the track the diffusion of these methods into the realms of humanitarian aid, workplace participation, and social housing, through presentations on case studies from South Africa, Scandinavia, and Portugal.  Finally, we will return to New York City, where current practices of community design will open onto longer histories of storefront offices, collaborative charrettes, and the dissolution and re-professionalization of participatory design education.

 

Requirements

Students are required to post weekly, single paragraph-long, questions in advance to the course site on Canvas which will serve as a springboard for in-class discussions.  Questions should be posted by 5pm on Thursday evenings so that everyone has time to read them before class. 

Over the course of the semester, students will work towards a final paper that develops from the material and themes covered in the course.  Students should choose a topic that is historically specific, thematically confined, and that can be explored in depth.  Comparative approaches are possible but no broad surveys will be accepted.  Students may opt to reconstruct a participatory design event via archival materials and interviews with participants, conduct fieldwork within a participatory design practice today, or track the diffusion of a particular design technique across two or more participatory projects.  Papers should be 15-20 pages, 12-point double-spaced, approx. 4,000-5,000 words plus footnotes with abstracts and an annotated bibliography submitted in advance.   

All papers should follow bibliographic, footnoting, and other guidelines outlined in the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. (available online through CLIO).

https://www-chicagomanualofstyle-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/book/ed17/frontmatter/toc.html

Abstracts are due at 5pm on March 9th, 2023, uploaded to a shared google document that will be posted in advance on Canvas (see Assignments)

Final papers are due at 5pm on May 5th, 2023, submitted as a PDF on Canvas (see Assignments).

 

Grading & Integrity

Class Participation:     30%

Workshop:                   10%  

Abstract:                      15%

Project Presentation:  15%

Final Assignment         30%

 

Students are expected to attend all class sessions and will be penalized for more than 2 unexplained course absences. Students should adhere to standard guidelines regarding academic honesty, such as those described in the GSAS Statement on Academic Honesty.

 

 

January 20th 

Participation and Participatory Design

 

  • Banham, Reyner. “Alternative Networks for the Alternative Culture?” in Design Participation: Proceedings of the Design Research Society’s Conference (Manchester, September 1971), ed. Nigel Cross (London: Academy Editions, 1972).

 

 

Further Reading

 

  • Baiocchi, Gianpaolo and Ernesto Ganuza. “The Age of Participation,” in Popular Democracy: The Paradox of Participation. Stanford: Stanford University, 2017.

 

  • Latour, Bruno. "A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design." in In Medias Res : Peter Sloterdijk's Spherological Poetics of Being, ed. 63 Willem Schinkel and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011.

 

 

 

January 27th  

Calls for Participation (Workshop)

 

  • De Carlo, Giancarlo, An Architecture of Participation: The Melbourne Architectural Papers (South Melbourne: Royal Australian Institute of Architects, [1971] 1972).

 

 Further Reading

 

  • Borasi, Giovanna ed. The Other Architect: Another Way of Building Architecture. Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 2015.

 

  • Buckley, Craig. Ed. After the Manifesto: Writing, Architecture and Media in a New Century. New York: GSAPP Books, 2014.

         

 

February 3rd 

Designing Participation

 

  • Alexander, Christopher. The Oregon Experiment. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 1975

 

  • Friedman, Yona. Toward a Scientific Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1975.

 

  • Lobsinger, Mary Louise “Two Cambridges: Methods, Models, Systems, and Expertise,” A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the “Techno-Social” Moment, edited by Michael Kubo, Stephanie Marie Tuerk, Irina Chernykova, and Arindam Dutta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013

 

  • Dutta, Arindam, “Linguistics, Not Grammatology: Architecture’s a Prioris and Architecture’s Priori‐ ties.” In A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the “Techno-Social” Moment, edited by Michael Kubo, Stephanie Marie Tuerk, Irina Chernykova, and Arindam Dutta. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013

 

Further Reading

 

  • Nolan, Ginger. “Folders, Patterns, and Villages: Pastoral Technics and the Center for Environmental Structure” in Architectural History Collaborative, A. (Ed.). (2022). Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/10.4324/9781003193654

 

  • Martin, Reinhold, “Environment, c. 1973,” Grey Room 14 (Winter 2004): 78-101.

 

  • Busbea, Larry. “Responsive Environments,” in The Responsive Environment. Design, Aesthetics, and the` Human in the 1970s. Minnesota: University of Minessota Press, 2020.

 

 

February 10th 

Material Participation

 

  • Kelty, Christopher. “Introduction,” The Participant: The Participant: A Century of Participation in Four Stories. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2019.

 

  • Marres, Nortje. "Introduction," Material Participation: Technology, the Environment, and Everyday Publics," Palgrave, 2012.

 

  • Lezaun, Javier and Linda Soneyrd. “Consulting Citizens: Technologies of Elicitation and the Mobility of Publics.” Public Understanding of Science. no.16 (2007): 279-297. 

 

Further Reading

 

  • Lezaun, Javier, “Offshore Democracy: Launch and Landfall of a Socio-Technical Experiment,” Economy and Society, 40:4, 553-581, DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2011.602296

 

 

  • Thrift, Nigel. “Re-Inventing Invention: New Tendencies in Capitalist Commodification, Economy and Society, 35:2, (2006), 279-306 DOI: 10.1080/03085140600635755

 

 

February 17th         

Little Development Devices (Guest, Laurin Baumgardt- Rice University Department of Anthropology)

 

  • Papanek, Victor. “Do-It-Yourself Murder: The Social and Moral Responsibilities of the Designer,” in Design for the Real World. 1971

 

 

 

 

Further Reading

 

  • Clarke, Alison. “Design for the Real World: A Call to Action,” in Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2021. 211-232.

 

  • Scott, Felicity, “Cruel Habitats,” in Outlaw Territories, Environments of Insecurity/ Architectures of Counterinsurgency, (MIT: Zone Books, 2016).

 

 

February 24th   

Design Ethnography in the Workplace

 

  • Ehn, Pelle and Morten Kyng. “Cardboard Computers: Mocking-it-up of Hands-on the Future,” in Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems Joan Greenbaum and Morten Kyng. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991. 169-195.

 

  • Suchman, L., Trigg, R., & Blomberg, J. (2002), “Working Artefacts: Ethnomethods of the Prototype,” The British Journal of Sociology, 53(2): 163­179.

 

  • Secomandi, Franco and Dirk Snelders, “The Object of Service Design,” Design Issues 27, no.3 (2011) 20-34.

 

 

Further Reading

 

  • Murphy, Keith M. “Design and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 45 (2016): 433–49. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24811575.

 

  • Cefkin, Melissa, “Introduction” Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations(New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).

 

March 3rd 

Citizen Architecture:  The Case of SAAL (Guest, Marta Caldeira- Yale University School of Architecture)

 

  • Portas, Nuno. “SAAL and the Urban Revolution in Portugal,” The Scope of Social Architecture, ed. C. Richard Hatch (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1984), 258-269. 

 

  • Bandeirinha, José António. “Portugal 1975: an Extreme Experiment in Social Housing – the SAAL Process, Thirty-Five Years On, Models, Assessments and Upgrades,” Lotus International, No. 45 (2011): 48-53.  

 

  • Balibar, Etienne “From Social Citizenship to the Social National State” and “Citizenship and Exclusion,” Citizenship (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), 45-61 and 62-82. 

 

Further Reading

 

  • Hugron, Jean-Philippe, “Participation and Architecture, The SAAL Experience,” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’Hui, 432 (September 2019): 56-65. 

 

  • Mota, Nelson “From House to Home: Social Control and Emancipation in Portuguese Public Housing, 1926-1976,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 78, Iss. 2 (Jun 2019): 208-226. 

 

  • “City/Democracy: Retrieving Citizenship,” Architecture and Participation, Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu, Jeremy Till, eds. (London: Routledge, 2005).  

 

March 10th 

Kinne Week

Virtual Class, Circulation of Abstracts, Office Hours

 

March 24th 

Outposts and Enclaves: Community Design in the U.S.

 

  • Community Design. Involvement and Architecture in the US since 1963: Projects, An Architektur, no.19 (September 2008), 27-56

 

  • Comerio, Mary, “Community Design: Idealism and Entrepreneurship.” Journal of Architecture and Planning Research 1, (1984) : 227-243.

 

  • Goldstein, Brian. “Reforming Renewal,” in The Roots of Urban Renaissance : Gentrification and the Struggle Over Harlem. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017

 

Further Reading

 

 

  • Immerwahr, Daniel. 2015. Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

 

  • Larson, Magali Sarfatti, “Architecture and the Political Economy of Cities,” in Behind the Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late 20th Century America, Berkeley: University of California, 1993.

 

 

March 31st

Elicit Materials and the Rise of the Facilitator (Guests, Jae Shin, Hector Design Group and Violette de la Selle and Michael Robinson Cohen, CityGroup)

  • Riddick II, William. Charrette Processes: A Tool in Urban Planning. York, PA.: George Shumway, 1971

 

  • “Design Kit: The Human‐Centered Design Tool” (blog). https://www.ideo.com /post/design‐kit. 2009

 

  • Wilf, Eitan. “Introduction” and “The Post-it Note Economy” in Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019

 

  • Mead, Margaret and Paul Byers, “Participants and Styles of Participation,” in The Small Conference: An Innovation in Communication (Mouton, 1968).

 

Further Reading

 

 

 

April 7th 

Deschooling and Reprofessionalization

 

  • Selections from Radical Pedagogies, Beatriz Colomina, Evangelos Kotsioris, Ignacio Galan, Anna-Maria Meister. Cambridge: MIT, 2022.

 

 

 

April 14th

 

         Final Presentations

Course Summary:

Date Details Due