Boundary, Inquiry & Perspectives

To be able to write the diaries after almost 2 months from the class, I preferred to go back to the audios and listen to the lectures once again. Thanks David, this time new things were showed off to me. I summarized the lectures for my own, but I am not going to post the full summery here as my blog post. Just to point out the main topics, the group 2 focused on the concept of different perspective, boundaries and values. The lecture was started with a group activity with all students on the topic of Tallinn-Helsinki tunnel and was trying to reveal the role of individual’s perspective, experience, motivation and benefits in a discussion between different stakeholders. Ulrich’s Value Triangle shows how boundary judgment, observation and evaluation have interactive effect on each other. And he proposes the boundary criticism based on our experience: self-reflective boundary questioning, dialogical boundary questioning and controversial boundary questioning.

 

The next lecture topic was on different perspectives that could be seen- or ignored- in making a decision. This discussion takes us to the confrontation of citizens vs. professionals. Depends on to what extent democratic you want to make a decision, the process of decision-making could be limited to the professionals, or more open to the citizens and their different views and perspectives. This is the point that I want to focus on more in this text. In my field, architecture, for long time the common design process has been that the architect, as head of the design team, uses different expertise of the team members to make the final decision and design. These are all based on the project topic and its main concept, the needs and goals of the project and its possibilities and limitations of the projects as the facts. As different expertise involved in an architectural design project get more complex and professional, the architect prefers to involve his team members more into the decision making process (to be more accurate and avoid failure probabilities). This is already happened in the design teams for several decades more or less in many design teams. Later on, to have a more successful design, many architecture offices tried to get closer to future users of the building and get their needs and opinions beforehand to use in the design process. In the recent years, I have got to know a new method or attitude, which goes a pace further and more directly involves people, as the social stakeholders of the building, along with the other stakeholders into and during the design process and the decision making. This method is called participatory design and “is an approach to the assessment, design, and development of technological and organizational systems. The impetus of Participatory Design is to encourage the active involvement of potential or current end-users of a system in the design and decision-making processes.” 2 This method is- in my opinion- in the trial and error step in discipline of architecture, and is getting more popular in academic approach of architectural design, specially in socialist countries such as Finland.

 

In the following the lecture was about the boundary issues and divided them to four main categorize of: 1. Sources of motivation, 2. Sources of power, 3. Sources of knowledge, 4. Sources of legitimation. The three first categorize are those who involved in the decision-making and the forth group is those who affected by it. What was discussed, as a conclusion is that in order to make the best possible judgment and decision in the end, different stakeholders should understand others’ boundaries, and make the gap between the involved and affected groups as less as possible; for instance experts and citizens should question each other to reach an acceptable extent of mutual understanding.

 

References

1. Ulrich, W (2000) Reflective practice in the civil society
2. Stanford University, http://cs.stanford.edu