Significance of Participatory Design Processes in Building Ecological Literacy: A Process Oriented Post-Occupancy Evaluation

by Nicole Kistler

Chairperson of the Supervisory Committee
Professor David Streatfield

2002

When we talk about making a place or place making, we have to ask ourselves some basic questions. What does this place mean? What defines it? To whom does this place belong? In a democratic society, public places should belong to the public – the public should be the place-makers. Landscape architects are professional place-makers empowered to guide the process of place making. If landscape architects are to guide the making of places that are healthy, then they must also be healthy places in the larger contexts of our environment. So we must ask, “what kinds of ecological systems run through or within this place; what other species need accommodations in this place;” and questions about time like, “what was this place like in the past; what should it be now, and what are the ramifications of design choices in the future?” It also means that it is our responsibility to help others ask those questions, as we guide their decision-making in the design and construction of places.

When we daydream about a healthy world where everyone’s voice matters, we might choose to call that Ecological Democracy. Randy Hester coined this term as the fusion of the habitat-shaping forces of ecology and democracy, pointing to their sweeping political influence in place making. The beauty of the profession of landscape architecture is that it uses living materials. They grow and change, and while we try to guide that growth and change by good planning and maintenance they are largely out of our control, and have an inherent beauty all their own, beyond anything we are capable of shaping with our own hand alone.

Landscape architecture is fundamentally about the design of specific places. It is grounded in all the opportunities, difficulties and details inherent to place, and in earth, sun, air, water, and organisms – particularly people. This thesis is a case study that combines background research with the post-occupancy evaluation of a local project. It makes sense to ground scholarship in landscape architecture in a case study approach, because case studies are grounded in people and place. Case studies can provide a set of lessons learned whose wisdom can be applied to new projects and that also can be used to continue to improve the place studied. This case study is an exploration of the participatory design processes used to create a specific place and how those processes influenced users’ connections with and understanding of nature.

The study began with background research in two areas. First, research was conducted to understand the human relationship with nature including how people connect to and form relationships with nature and subsequently how they form meaning from those experiences. This was a study of how people learn about nature, how they interpret nature, how they convey meaning, and how that can be shared. It also explores the idea of “nearby nature” and why that is meaningful in the day-to-day lives of city-dwellers. The second component of the background focused on participatory design processes. This section provides a brief history of participatory design in place making, and discusses what is regarded today as successful components of participatory design.

The case-study component focused on the design/build processes used to create three rooftop gardens at Cancer Lifeline Center, a support center for people living with cancer in Seattle, Washington. The major components of the participatory design processes included a preliminary study and a set of design charettes. A preliminary study was conducted by Dr. Anne Kearney from Forest Resources at the University of Washington to help determine the program for the gardens. Professors, Luanne Smith and Daniel Winterbottom, from the Department of Landscape organized the design processes with the students, and encouraged students during construction. The process oriented post-occupancy evaluation was created to best analyze the success of these processes. Then, a set of interviews were designed and conducted with garden users (staff and clients of the Center) and the students who worked on the projects. A content analysis of the interviews provided results, which led to a series of conclusions and a new theory about how ecological literacy fits into place making.