FOUNDED ON THE FIRM BELIEF THAT “EVERYONE HAS THE RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN AND INFLUENCE THE DESIGN AND PLANNING PROCESS THAT AFFECT THEM,” PARTICIPATE IN DESIGN (P!D) ISN’T INTERESTED IN MAKING THINGS FOR YOU BUT RATHER WITH YOU.
Founded by Jan Lim and Mizah Rahman, the Singapore-based non-profit Participate in Design (P!D) sets up initiatives aimed at facilitating public engagement and fostering the growth of both engaged and empowered communities. Having been implementing said Participatory Design Work since 2010, presented here in the team’s first publication, we get to see a recap of not only what events and programs they have realized and accomplished, but also what they’ve learned along the way.
Separated into two sections, ‘Landscapes in Participation Today’ that compares participatory practices across three cities, New York, Copenhagen and Singapore and ‘Participatory Design for Singapore’ that sees such research put into action, we get to witness how the organizations 11 principles for designing with people come into play within a variety of scenarios such as the ‘Urban Explorer Participatory Planning Toolkit Series’ which develops children’s understanding of and creativity towards their built environment to the HappyStreetsSG project that educates the public through the creation of community art and the Participatory Arts Workshops which educate and provide art practitioners with a framework for engaging communities.
Looking at the discipline of design as a process rather than a product is par for the course for P!D and, with that framework in mind, this text makes perfect sense – as it makes information available while simultaneously equipping the reader with the skills, inspiration and knowledge needed to take things further, write their own stories and even design their own endings.