DRS2012 Bangkok Proceedings Vol 4 - Design Research Society

1678 Conference Proceedings
Participatory Design
Neighborhood Labs – Community building through knowledge transfer
Participatory design, as an attempt to actively involve all or at least most stakeholders in
a democratic innovation process, has evolved from its explicitly political roots in the
Scandinavian workplace movement in the 1970s into an approach that has been taken up
by many different design disciplines, such as software design, urban design, product
design or interaction design (Ehn, 2010; Sanders, 2008; Lengwiler, 2008).
From our approach we see a strong distinction of enabling participation for a wide range
of stakeholders, to the idea of “lead users” (Von Hippel, 1986), who are characterized as
early adopters of new products or services.
The use of participation has also been widely acknowledged in the business community,
where the corresponding theme is “open innovation” which implies an opening up of the
business structure for the collaboration on ideas with outside influences.
In this paper we build on the initial political approach, as it is strongly tied to the notions of
sustainable design that we are addressing in our research.
Local Setting & Participants
The project takes place in a designated neighborhood (Kiez) in Berlin called the
Fischerkiez.
The Fischerkiez is a small district with a population of about 2000 people, located at the
Spreeinsel (river island) in the old center of what used to be East Berlin. Considering that
it is fairly central and close to highly frequented places like the Museumsinsel (museum
island), and seeing that it is regarded as a tourist insider tip due to its picturesque charm,
it has remained quite untouched since its establishment.
Originally planned and built as an area for wealthy traders and fishermen in the fifteenth
century, the Fischerkiez came to exist as a living area for the low-income population in
the middle of the nineteenth century and thus experienced no further development, which
is presumably one reason for the preservation of its medieval character, even up to and
during the Second World War, in which the neighborhood remained astonishingly
unharmed by the infamous bombings.
In the 1970s, socialist city planners destroyed the assemblies in order to build an
exemplary multi-apartment housing complex. Due to the very close proximity of the
Fischerkiez to the border to former West Berlin, these high-rise buildings were planned to
represent the strong and modern GDR, as well as to set an example of the panel
construction in a larger scale. The area was inhabited mainly by privileged and loyal GDR
citizens, as well as GDR functionaries.
Today the dominantly elderly population (Statistics Office Berlin-Brandenburg, 2011) is
characterized by a large group of senior inhabitants who share similar GDR biographies.
They are confronted more and more by “new-Berliners”, younger people that choose to
move to the Fischerkiez due to the affordable rents, even considering the central location
of the area. Both groups coexist but rarely interact, mainly due to widely differing living
situations and diverging experiences. We learned by talking with inhabitants on the island
that the architectural structure of the neighborhood itself is broadly perceived as
anonymous and cold; former common rooms as well as a mall-like passage that both
functioned as gathering places now belong to the past, and are deserted. (Schwenk,
2002:56; Berning et.al., 2003:186)