24.04.2014 / 12:00 – 15:00
Location: Aalto University, Otaniemi campus, Otakaari 1, E-hall.

MA Joanna Saad-Sulonen defended her dissertation Combining Participations: Expanding the Locus of Participatory E-planning by Combining Participatory Approaches in the Design of Digital Technology and in Urban Planning. Professor Susanne Bødker, Institute of Computer Science, Aarhus University, acted as the Opponent. Professor Lily Diaz will acted as the Custos.

Combining Participations is a trans-disciplinary work on participatory e-planning, which the author re-conceptualises as comprising different types of participation that take place in urban planning, as well as in the design of digital technology. The different types of participation can occur simultaneously in different combinations and affect one another.
 
At a time when the increasing rate of both urbanisation and digitisation around the globe is bringing urban planning and digital technology closer to one another, it is important to move beyond buzzwords such a ‘smart cities’ and ‘living labs’. This thesis provides novel tools, such as the matrix of multiple participations and the Expanded Participatory Design approach, which make it possible to explore a more genuinely democratic vision of cities and technologies and to devise ways of realising such vision.