KomInDu - A Small Project about Big Issues

Abstract

In this short paper, we present glimpses from an interdisciplinary research and development project aimed at enhancing local democracy by developing ICT support for the consultation process around the comprehensive plan of a municipality. For the participating researchers, the project offered the opportunity of combining and comparing approaches and methods from two different design traditions that share democratic ideals and ambitions of nurturing citizen/user participation in design processes. This proved to be more challenging than we had originally anticipated. Differences in perspective gave different interpretations of the design context as well as of how participatory the processes actually were.