RSD11

DRAFT PROCEEDINGS

Institutionalizing New Civic Learning Traditions: Nurturing design practice in planning cultures -166

Tom Flanagan, Alexander N. Christakis, and Maria Kakoulaki

Institute for 21st Century Agoras USA | Institute for 21st Century Agoras EUROPE | Institute for 21st Century Agoras EUROPE

Design professionals working on civic design initiatives are aware of the current trend to democratise civic think tanks. These think tanks have been taking form under the name “social labs” (Hassan, 2014), “urban labs” (Scholl et al., 2017), and even “sidewalk labs” as advanced by Google (Mondon, 2015). Without the explicit commitment to an identifiable design process, street-level think tanks risk devolving into familiar planning exercises. There are multiple forces acting to resist initiating, sustaining and expanding design dialogues in the public sphere. Only by recognising these challenges can the governance of representative decision-making be genuinely and effectively enabled with inclusive alternative designs for our decision-makers.

KEYWORDS:  planning, design, civic engagement, social learning, dialogic design, cultural acceptability, meta-dialogue for design.

Posted September 2022

©­ Author, published by the Systemic Design Association

Open Access article published under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License. This permits anyone to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or form according to the licence terms.

Suggested Citation Format (APA)

Author(s) (20##). Article title. Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD#) Symposium. rsdsymposium.org/LINK.

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