Critical designing with communities: the case of a housing rights campaign in Leith, Edinburgh

Abstract

Recent movements of participatory democracy in welfare states have changed the governance from public administration to the hands of social agents.

The call for a responsible and rational agent has now become all the more important to increase the collaborative relations of policy actors in policy implementation. In this study, the role of a professional designer in the public realm to cope with the challenges of collaboration between state and local actors is examined in order to explore collaborative design methods aimed at coordination. The attributes of social complexity and civic capacity have been suggested as challenges to coordination, resulting in the adoption of a critical position and approaches to exploration. I conducted an eighteen-month empirical case study of the housing rights campaign held in Leith, Edinburgh, by employing ethnographic and action-research methodologies to align field and design work with the campaign operation. Working alongside the resident volunteers, social workers, and authority officials, I came to launch three cases of design work on place-making, contributing to the implementation of a three-million-pound refurbishment scheme from the city council to the affected housing blocks. As a result, the empirical findings support the promotion of caring and civic behaviors as forms of political behavior to be oriented in policy and public engagements. I claim for dialectical sensemaking as an original approach to codesign methods aimed at this promotion.

Taken together, the implications to a direction on community-led design are drawn, suggesting its relevance as a future area of practice to increase local autonomy for the common good.