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Designing for reimagined communities

Within place-based design research, the concept of community has become an increasingly important reference point, particularly in relation to the areas of co-design and participatory design. This Special Issue ‘Designing for Reimagined Communities’ developed outwards from a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded programme Design Innovation & Land-Assets: Towards new communities. Here, a review of the available participatory and collaborative framings of the community in design revealed a broad landscape of directions. In Participatory Design (PD) alone, the two-decade move from the workplace to the civic arena (Bjögvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012) has led to a proliferation of community-based approaches (DiSalvo, Clement, and Volkmar 2013). In co-design more broadly, community can be seen to mark a ‘coming together’ of individuals, citizens, and broader groups of participants (Steen 2013). This coming together may be a matter of geographical proximity – people reside in the same location and as such share similar place-based concerns – social, cultural, infrastructural, or otherwise (Calvo and De Rosa 2017). Alternatively, it may be that local concerns themselves take precedence. In this case, regardless of their grounding in a particular place, the ‘community’ will be formed around their involvement in a specific ‘issue’ (Latour and Weibel 2005). In designing for and with communities, designers are tasked with formulating a response as they seek to support communities through the process of addressing their concerns and issues. The aim of such engagements may be specific and targeted, for example, exploring the best use of shared resources and land assets such as a building or public park (Halse et al. 2010). Equally, aims may be broader in scope, for example, there may be a need to examine specific democratic or institutional approaches or influence policy, perhaps at the level of local government or beyond (Huybrechts, Benesch, and Geib 2017; Kimbell and Bailey 2017). On the face of it, such an account would appear to be more or less straightforward – communities take on their particular form based on their issues or concerns – and thereafter designers work with them to formulate a design-led response. However, what is missing from this account is an understanding of the steps that must take place beforehand. Specifically, how design supports the process of communities ‘coming together’, of establishing collaborations around issues or concerns. There is also the question of how, within the process of community engagement and beyond, design draws