Mariana Salgado

... so what?: limitations of participatory design on decision-making in urban planning

This article addresses certain Participatory Design (PD)-related aspects of the project OurCity that took place in Meri-Rastila, a multicultural suburb in East Helsinki, Finland. The aim of OurCity was to democratize design processes and to empower local residents to influence the redevelopment of their area. PD processes were a key component to the OurCity project and its activities, particularly in relation to the process of drafting an Alternative Master Plan (AMP) for the area. The plan competed with, and lost by a narrow margin to, the plan drafted by the Helsinki City Planning Department. The scope of PD was underestimated because AMP, the design object, was envisioned in isolation from the participatory process it entailed. Had PD been presented as crucial to the process, AMP would have greater impact. In this article, we argue that it is necessary to make PD processes more visible in the end products of participatory planning. We base this argument on firsthand experience as members of the OurCity team and on an analysis of printed media and digital texts.

Designing Access to Audiovisual Cultural Heritage: The Case of the Carrot

This paper presents the design of an application for engagement with audiovisual digital cultural heritage in the classroom, called the Carrot. The aim of this interactive tool is to make online cultural heritage accessible and understandable for students in different levels of education. In relation to this work we pose two research questions: Why do we need to develop tools for contextualization of audiovisual cultural heritage? And: How do we design and develop such tools? The preliminary answers to these questions come from our experiences in the design process, which deepened our understanding of a tool in the context of the classroom. We then relate this to the digital humanities project, EUscreenXL. Initial conclusions suggest that tools for contextualization of audiovisual cultural heritage can engage students with cultural heritage, develop digital media literacy, and support contemporary didactics. These tools need to be developed across platforms, using nonproprietary software and involving a multidisciplinary group of experts.