Article:

A common understanding exists that citizens should become more involved in thedesign, planning, and governance of the city. Due to a lack of common platformsand difficulties in the meaningful integration of the participatory input, however,the tools and methods currently employed in citizen engagement are often illconnected to the design and governance tools and processes used by experts. Inthis paper we describe a Grasshopper and Rhino based approach, which allowsdesigners to share a subset of the design space formed by parametric designvariants with citizens via the online interface Beta.Speckle. In a user study weevaluated the usability of the tool as well as studied the design choices ofparticipants, which were found to be influenced by preferences for visual orderand underlying economic, social, and environmental values. For the futuredesign of participatory exercises, it was concluded that indicators relating tocitizens' values and preferences will allow for a more effective exploration of thedesign space and increase the meaningfulness of results.