Abstract
Participatory Design (PD) can help to produce sustainable and user-oriented outputs by involving end users and other stakeholders in early design stages. In heritage projects, PD is considered a democratic process for designing with communities to address local issues and to give them a central role in generating insights about the presentation and accessibility of heritage. As part of the cross-border collaborative project “Terra Mosana,” several PD workshops were planned in 2020 in different cities of the Meuse-Rhine Euregion, to involve and engage residents in design activities about the investigation and communication of the shared history of the region. The outbreak of COVID-19 made it challenging to conduct face-to-face activities. Therefore, we developed a scenario to move the workshops online, facilitating both synchronous and asynchronous activities.
This chapter investigates how PD in heritage projects can be effectively organized and enacted in times of crisis when people cannot meet in person. Moving the workshops online provided us with an opportunity to learn about how different communication tools and infrastructures influenced individual and collective participation during the pandemic. We open up a discussion about the potential challenges and concerns that may be encountered by those designing participatory heritage projects in the future.
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Notes
- 1.
The Terra Mosana project (2018–2021) was coordinated by University of Liège (Belgium) and was executed within the context of Interreg V-A Euregion MeuseRhine, and was financed by the European Regional Development Fund (Interreg), the Walloon Region, the Provinces of Limburg (NL and B) and the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia. Project website: https://www.terramosana.org/.
- 2.
The territory of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine has a population of 3.88 million people and covers an area of 11,000 km2 (between The Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany). The Dutch cities of Maastricht and Heerlen, the Belgian cities of Liège and Hasselt, and the German city of Aachen are the main centers of the EMR. In the past, the cross-border region formed a coherent cultural area between the Meuse and Rhine rivers but is now considered to be one of the most complex Euregions with its three languages and five partner regions. https://www.terramosana.org/blogs/5-things-you-dont-know-about-the-meuse-rhine-euregio/.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Terra Mosana partners for co-organizing the participatory design workshops, in particular Jolien Vanschoenwinkel for all her help in organizing and documenting the workshops. Many thanks also to the workshop participants for their time and commitment and sharing their valuable insights.
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Nofal, E., van Saaze, V., Wyatt, S. (2022). Online Participatory Design of Heritage Projects. In: Rausch, C., Benschop, R., Sitzia, E., van Saaze, V. (eds) Participatory Practices in Art and Cultural Heritage. Studies in Art, Heritage, Law and the Market, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05694-9_7
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