Ammon Beyerle

The starting point for participatory design is that all situations in which design interrogates are existing, functioning and thick. The process of engagement thus needs to delve into, to build relationship with, understand and manage environmental affects and propose. Indeed, products of participatory architecture are propositions, they are prototypes for implementation, adaption and rejection. In a process of prototypical proposition, there is no object, but a set of intersubjective relationships with and without the architecture. The product of architecture must meet with identified and latent systems of everyday life, and necessarily be defined by it contingently. The question becomes not how is the architecture occupied, but how does the architecture occupy, and what does that occupation do? The intervention of architecture thus becomes an actor in a field of relationships, taking on relational types – aggressor /defender, container / magnet, agonist / antagonist / ally.

It needs to be conceived that architecture can function as an objectified space, or similarly an occupied space with its own set of atmospheric conditions and effects. Undertaking architecture necessarily creates a particular interior, a position which brings about identities and conceptions of environments. The practice of architecture is as much a device for finding-out as it is a communication, or social communion.

Without a sense of prejudice, the binary inside/outside provides a theoretical mechanism of control, be in at least prototypical in nature. The proposal, and making of the proposal presents an opportunity to synthesise, construct a reality, to build. The occupation of that proposal, as an interior sets up the possibility for home base, be it a place to leave from, retreat to, avoid, work in or relax in, it is a constructed place of meaning and being.

A less-participatory design process preconceives an interior as a given before investigation. It assumes a situation and summarily the environmental conditions which are ‘in’-terior and thus, which are ‘out’ – ‘ext’-terior. Its purposes are more predefined, and thus, outcomes are controlled. The context of a less-participatory design process is transcendental, evident in the self referential conditions for its innovation, be they stakeholder limited (with defined interests and ‘needs analysis’) or in closed indexical positioning within the architectural-establishment. The latter condition is generally considered award-worthy architecture, the former, ‘engineering’ and best-practice delivery (with associated systematised processes and assessment critieria). A less-participatory design process conjures its control a priori. A simple metaphor for a less-participatory design process is the petri dish. The petri dish is a controlled paradigm, its relationships are necessarily transcendental only. This could relate to ‘high-theory’, with strong axioms and generalised rules. The architecture is the specimen of the process; the site is the specimen of inquiry, with a controlled laboratory established first-hand. This has obvious benefits in terms of budgeting, planning, risk management and time constraints. It is a laboratory of control, aim, method, outcome. The world is outside with a definable distinction to an inanimate inside.

A maximum-participatory design process does not preconceive an interior. Assumptions are formulated in the undertaking of the project and can continually change, the environmental conditions develop and are absolutely contingent, both as situation and effect; exterior becomes both what has not yet occurred, or what has already occurred. Synthesis is left for present situation or theoretical steps forward. The context of participatory design process is always in the world, transcendentality only occurs in terms of temporary lapses in time (like the charette, the prototype, the incubator, the test,  the workshop), evident in the need to develop shared principles and necessitate their constant review, need to defined values and purpose, whilst conditions for creativity are rarely closed – ideas can come from anywhere and anyone at any time. Indeed, there is a transparent relationship between the development of a product, and the production of ideas (unlike the less-participatory counterpart).  This can be difficult and tiring at times, though it necessitates a depth of contingency that only breeds more and more relevance – or shall we say ‘situation’. Solutions come from anywhere, they are of different scale and grandeur depending on the situation, may they be interpersonal, physical, time or task orientated, or even fleeting, hyperspecific and procedural. A simple metaphor is the ecology. Imagine a wetland with a thousand organisms, large and small, upstream and downstream, chemical processes from contamination to production, categorisation of different parts and interdependent relationships, weather comes in and the scientist (architect) is a contaminating alien. The control of the ecology is without the architect, and the relationships within it are infinitely explorable and alive. Interventions in this ecology bring about wicked problems, theoretical propositions can only be ‘low theory’ – particularly contingent, and with no promise of inter-operability or translation beyond the system. To understand one must poke, squat down and look, watch, push in or pull out. The world is everywhere. Any sense of exterior can only be the philosophical antithesis of this way of working, but even this is a contingent paradigm. All action in this fundamentally ‘inside’ is ‘part of’ and contingent.