Abstract
This is a reflective paper that examines techniques community designers use in creating places with people. One of the difficult tasks community designers perform is exchanging complex ideas, science, and technical information with diverse publics. Even more difficult is listening to and then drawing values and ideas of others. More difficult still is to synthesize and draw designs for imagined environments collaboratively. Although drawing is a key part of professional design education, these nonverbal communication problems challenge every community designer. Drawing with the public is immeasurably more complex than the communication techniques learned for traditional architectural or planning practices. So what techniques are used for creating collaboratively? A review of community design projects from the proceedings of the Democratic Design in the Pacific Rim conferences reveals numerous improvisations in shared drawing. These “representative representations” might be categorized as follows: 1) representing people, 2) exchanging professional knowledge and local wisdom spatially, 3) coauthoring design, 4) empowering people to “represent” themselves, and 5) visualizing deep values: community, stewardship, fairness and distinctive place. The intent here is not to compare techniques across cultures, although observations will be made about drawing skills that seem particular to certain social contexts. The goal, rather, is to uncover and highlight spatial representation techniques that seem to be particularly effective in overcoming the difficulties of transactive design especially of actual form making. The most used nonverbal techniques include recording social ecology patterns (11 out of 101) and building sense of community through workdays and walking tours (10 out of 101). Most used of all techniques is the workshop. Three fourths of all the articles (75 out of 101) mention workshops without describing non-verbal methods, content or design outcome. The workshop seems to be the participatory “black box” through which community designers are as inarticulate as traditional designers are about creative form making. Surprisingly few articles (5 out of 101) describe methods in which design is coauthored, passing representation of form and space back and forth between community and designer.