Participation, co-creation, and public space

A central notion in urban design, urban interaction design, and placemaking is the user of public space, the occupant, resident, citizen, bystander, passer-by, explorer, or flâneur. When the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) first emerged, the disciplines that represented the “human” aspects of HCI included behavioural psychology, cognitive science and human factors engineering. This situatedness begs the question whether the “user” requires different contextualisations beyond the immediate and traditional HCI concerns of the technical interface, that is, beyond usability. This article aims to illustrate the need for placemakers and urban interaction designers to be transdisciplinary and agile in order to navigate different levels of granularity. This article seeks to practice granular agile thinking by introducing five possible ways to think about the “urban user” and the implications that follow: the user as city resident; the user as consumer of city services; the user as participant in the city’s community consultations; the user as co-creator in a collaborative approach to citymaking, and finally; the user re-thought as part of a much larger and more complex ecosystem of more-than-human worlds and of cohabitation – a process that decentres the human in the design of collaborative cities