Exploring the architect’s role in participatory design initiatives
By Jacob Swanson; Advisor: Dr. Maurie J. Cohen; July 2021
Participatory design practices have long been recognized in fields like urban planning, product design, and policy making, however architectural applications remain scant. One such example is cohousing, a housing model that pairs smaller-than-usual private dwellings with generous shared spaces to facilitate community-building. Here, prospective residents are intimately involved in the design of their new neighborhood. In addition to creating a built structure, scholars and practitioners generally consider the development process integral to building the future community’s social fabric. In the current literature, this multifaceted approach has been underexplored from an architectural perspective. Thus, this project aims to answer two central research questions: What makes an architect successful in cohousing? And how is codesign practiced in cohousing and how do architects understand their role?
To answer these questions, I conducted ten semi-structured interviews with professionals, mostly architects but including developers and development consultants, with varying levels of experience in cohousing. Differences in experience level are important because it offers a chance to get insight at the project-, as well as field-, scales. Architects were originally identified through an online directory maintained by the Cohousing Association of the United States and additional interviewees were identified through snowball sampling. Consistent with a grounded theory approach, the interview instrument was iteratively refined throughout the interview sequence. A literature review of published material authored by practitioners was carried out in parallel.
Preliminary analysis suggests three mechanisms by which the participatory design process becomes a way of building social solidarity among future residents. The first is professional guidance that only allows the group to engage in productive conflict. Professionals must make sure that the design questions they pose to the group are important to the design’s direction and have answers that are sufficiently objective. Because most groups use consensus governance, all members must be able to agree to a specific solution. The most common example is that of paint colors; because this is subjective and unlikely to present a good forum for community-building, architects make that decision themselves instead of asking the group. Doing this allows the project to stay on-schedule and gives residents a sense of accomplishment at moving forward. The second process is the transformation of design questions into conversations to reconcile residents’ values. A question about how many parking spaces to have or prioritization of amenities becomes a way to talk about how the community wants to live and allows them to coalesce around shared values, providing further guidance to the architectural team. The third mechanism is making the design process an event. A design workshop gives residents a time to get together. Interactions before, during, and after can lead to further relationship-building activities outside of the formality of group processes. Workshops also serves a marketing purpose to help grow groups from a few families to the necessary 20 or 30 by giving them the chance to shape the final building.
Thus, the central professional challenge of cohousing is balancing a complex social development process with an already complicated development process. Further work on this project will include data analysis completion, a potential second round of interviews, and a reintegration with existing literature on participatory design and cohousing.
Originally published in 2021 Undergraduate Summer Research and Innovation Symposium Book of Abstracts; July 2021
Jacob Swanson 