Middle-Out Design: Enabling Collaborative City Making Through Digitally Augmented Pop-Ups

Abstract

The contemporary city is challenged by various social, cultural, political and environmental complexities. The increasing demands on cities globally puts pressure on governments and local communities to manage existing public assets and space, as well as designing and developing new infrastructure that is required to service a variety of urban dwellers. However, the level of community engagement undertaken during the city-making process commonly takes a one size fits all approach, with the level of engagement reduced to informing people, rather than collaborating with them. Top-down approaches to city -making, generally championed by government and private enterprise, have arguably failed to engage and inspire communities in meaningful ways. Likewise, bottom-up initiatives driven by local communities have also proven to be difficult in promoting effective and lasting impacts on official city-making initiatives. The thesis reports on the design, implementation and deployment of a series of pop-up interventions, which used a combination of digital and analogue media, as well as their effectiveness for allowing people to submit their views, thoughts and opinions on various city-making initiatives. The findings and recommendations, which emerged from the research, illustrate the potential of combining social, analogue and digital interactions by outlining a number of comprehensive frameworks. First, this includes a collaborative and inclusive design approach, referred to as middle-out design. This approach draws on the collective knowledge from stakeholders at the top and everyday people at the bottom, in order to meet somewhere in the middle. Second, an urban acupuncture framework was developed as a guide to deploy pop-up community engagement programmes locally or city-wide. Third, a set of design patterns was created for the design and development of digitally augmented pop-ups.