Co-Design and Co-Decision: Decision Making on Collaborative Design Platforms

On the background of an increasing interest in participatory approaches in urban development, a multitude of participation methods has been created and tested over the past years. They key issue decision making in participatory settings, however, remains an open question, especially in digital forms of participation. While in conventional non-participatory approaches, decisions are made largely without public communication, common-use participatory formats either follow a highly diffuse way of decision making, or fall back onto limited methods such as voting or tally sheets. Responding to the rising demand for digital participation in urban design, this paper investigates effective decision making in participatory non-digital workshop formats in order to translate them into digital formats. The article reviews key challenges in urban design decisions, interprets them on the basis of participatory approaches, and proposes decision making models suitable for translation into digital tools. The paper refers to decision making in contexts such as law, design or engineering and demonstrates how principles borrowed from such realms can be adopted for formalizing the demand description (User Story) for the development of digital interaction tools. This paper is associated to the EU funded Horizon2020 project “U_CODE Urban Collective Design Environment” which creates a new co-design platform for massive participation in urban planning and design.