PARTICIPATORY DESIGN and PLANNING: an OPEN SOURCE and EVOLUTIONARY DESIGN PERSPECTIVE Summary 1. Introduction 2. What Is Partic

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The 2005 World Sustainable Building Conference, 17-002 Tokyo, 27-29 September 2005 (SB05Tokyo) PARTICIPATORY DESIGN AND PLANNING: AN OPEN SOURCE AND EVOLUTIONARY DESIGN PERSPECTIVE

Joseph Francis WONG M.Arch., HKIA 1

1 Division of Building Science and Technology, The City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong, [email protected]

Keywords: urban design, participatory planning and design, evolutionary design, open source design Summary In view of the rapidly increasing complexity of urban design issues and the growing demand for a higher level of public involvement in planning, present approaches to community development and renewal is urgently in need of comprehensive review and fundamental change. This paper examines a model for participatory planning and design to allow higher community involvement in decision making regarding issues about their built environment – Evolutionary Participatory Open Design (ePOD). The model utilizes the Internet to reach a much higher number of users and stakeholders than current methods of public consultation and participation in urban planning. ePOD borrows heavily from the emerging fields of computational evolutionary design and open source design, and builds on their respective principles as its foundations. A framework will be introduced to analyze the relationship between different levels of participation and the core stages of the ePOD process. 1. Introduction Faced with intense and complex demands by the public for sustainable and high quality urban and architectural design to satisfy the rapidly changing and diversifying needs of its inhabitants, government authorities and professionals are increasingly looking into participatory design and planning methodology as a means to incorporate more public input in the urban regeneration process. This is sensible because while authorities and professionals are in a good position to form the overview and identify macroscopic issues based on their experience and expertise, it is the users themselves who are most familiar with the microscopic picture because of their day-to-day experience and involvement in what actually takes place within the urban fabric. The objective of this paper is to look into the issues and implications pertaining to a model of public participatory design/planning in an “open source” platform based on principles of evolutionary design. This platform can play a key role in forming a more comprehensive development of participatory design / planning process and mechanism combining internet technology and evolutionary design principles to: 1) Involve a much wider spectrum and higher percentage of the public; 2) Provide an interactive environment for the public to contribute their own ideas and to know about other people’s ideas; and 3) Work together towards common objectives for planning and design through a consensus building process. The remainder of the paper is outlined as follows: Section 2 gives a brief discussion of key concepts relating to participatory planning/design and consensus design, some examples of current practices and suggests evolutionary design and open-source design as alternative approaches to participatory planning and design. Sections 3 and 4 introduce respectively the emerging fields of evolutionary design and open-source movement as key components of the proposed internet-based participatory planning/design model and their implications. Section 5 lays out the basic concept of a framework for Evolutionary-Participatory Open Design (e-POD) and its various models. 2. What is Participatory Planning and Design?

2.1 The Pragmatic Perspective Participatory design, or participatory planning, is a blanket term covering many fields while taking many different approaches. There is no single definition of participatory design as such as it is an emerging field that is increasingly being applied in a variety of forms in diverse fields (Luke et al, 2004) including building design, software, mobile telephones, automobiles, graphic design, and even such fields as fast food and political slogans. One of the major basic assumptions behind the participatory design movement is that the user knows what is best for them and therefore involving them in the design process can allow such preferences or needs to be known while formulating the design or product. The global computer technology organization Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) defines “participatory design” as “an approach to the assessment, design, and development of technological and organizational systems that places a premium on the active involvement of potential or current users of the system in design and decision-making processes (CPSR, 2004).” These are some of the reasons why automaker General Motors brought in visitors to critique designs of their new Hummer H3 sports utility vehicle over 3-day sessions during preliminary design stages “to see how much they could stretch the design” (Wells, 2005). GM designers would immediately make revisions to their

- 4178 - The 2005 World Sustainable Building Conference, Tokyo, 27-29 September 2005 (SB05Tokyo) designs based on the group’s comments and prepare new designs for the next group of visitors to critique on. The process adopted by GM as described above obviously places value on the views given by the users, despite their lack of professional training and expertise on the field in question. This reflects the pragmatic, or technical, perspective of participatory planning and design: the participation of users in certain stages of the design process (decision-making process) can make significant contributions to the development of successful and high quality designs. As a methodology, the participatory planning and design process belongs to the interpretivist paradigm, which views reality and its knowledge as intrinsicly linked to the actions of the particpants in context and can only be interperted through the participants themselves.

2.2 The Political Perspective One important idea not covered by the above discussion on the pragmatic/technical perspective of the participatory process is that of empowerment . The “power” of the users and stakeholders comes from their knowledge on the processes of the “inside” which “outsiders” do not and cannot possess. Under this view of “knowledge as power”, paticipatory planning and design becomes a political process with the production of knowledge and who controls the process of knowing as its core issues. This is in sharp contrast to the prevalent practice of urban planning, labeled “orthodox planning” by Hamdi and Goethert (1997), utilizing the usual tools of outline concept plans, outline development plans, master layout plans, development controls, etc. Orthodox planning is led by an external authority, e.g. the government, and carried out by trained professionals with minimal involvement of the users or the stakeholders. One of the many criticisms of this process is that orthodox planning is often more concerned with designing plans to fulfill the statutory procedures rather than planning to achieve any real or valuable objectives in the region being planned (Devas, 1993). Hamdi and Goethert identified that one of the major trends in the new realism about city and urban development is “a new definition of public responsibility and a new role for development practitioners [ ] inspired by the trend toward “enabling” and away from providing”, which are the comparative characteristics of the orthodox paradigm and the participatory paradigm respectively (1997).

2.3 Public Participation vs Participatory Planning Participatory planning and design therefore requires more than just having public participation but focuses more on the nature and degree of participation by the users and stakeholders at various levels of the planning and design process. This is a critical issue as cases in the past has shown that “planning developed with public participation” are often projects designed by outside professionals and implemented through government authorities, relegating the “participation” part to labor tasks performed by the locals (McCall, 1987). To achieve the purposes of enabling and empowerment , one must modify, or even reverse, this conventional top-down approach and transform the planning process towards more genuine participation. To Schneider and Libercier, “genuine participation means that people should be involved throughout the project or programme cycle, from the design stage through monitoring and evaluation. Mere consultation of the people should no longer be considered as sufficient, nor should participation be limited to the implementation of activities previously defined from the outside (1995).” A 2004 research report from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, United Kingdom, titled “Participatory Planning for Sustainable Communities: International experience in mediation, negotiation and engagement in making plans,” labeled this type of public consultation strategy as “Decide-Announce-Defend” and associated it with important negative consequences of loss of trust, damaged relationships and an inability to resolve disputes when stances are firm, etc. (ODPM, 2004). This type of authority-led “public participation” process, often with pre- determined agendas and outcomes, must be replaced with “participatory planning and design.” 3 Evolutionary Design

3.1 Evolution Principle – Natural Selection A look around at living plants and organisms around you – a rose, a banyan tree, a bee, a jelly fish, a blue whale, or just look at yourself – it is clear that evolutionary design in nature is capable of generating astonishingly innovative and complex designs. Beginning with the simplest of life forms in single-celled organisms, Darwin’s forces of natural selection generates such a diverse number of different species, each with its own elaborate form and unique characteristics yet inter-connected in such a complex manner simply by “scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life (Darwin, 1859).” Computation evolutionary design expert Bentley recognizes this wondrous design mechanism in nature, “Natural evolution is, of course, the original and best evolutionary design system. Designs have been evolving in nature for hundreds of millions of years. Biological designs that far exceed any human designs in terms of complexity, performance, and efficiency are prolific throughout the living world. From the near-perfection of the streamlined shape of a shark, to the extraordinary molecular structure of a virus, every living thing is a marvel of evolved design (Bentley, 1999).” Therefore the agenda in learning from this evolutionary design system to benefit our own design endeavors can at least be twofold: First, how to harvest this wealth of diverse design solutions, and second, how to imitate this design systems to generate more effective and efficient design solutions. The 2005 World Sustainable Building Conference, Tokyo, 27-29 September 2005 (SB05Tokyo) 3.2 The Evolutionary System as a Complex Adaptive System Richard Dawkins, renowned evolution expert at Oxford University, asserts that evolution alone can only lead to divergence and diversity, but with the influence of natural selection, evolution can lead to adaptive improvement (1998). Evolution in isolation therefore cannot produce the kind of adaptive improvement that allows a species to better its chances of survival. Only through the interaction with other elements within the system can a species, or any element within a complex adaptive system, undergo meaningful evolutionary changes in the context of the larger system. Thus Darwin wrote, “Natural selection will modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the parent in relation to the young. In social animals it will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community; if each in consequence profits by the selected change. What natural selection cannot do, is to modify the structure of one species, without giving it any advantage, for the good of another species (1859).” Dawkins is convinced that the Darwinian evolution process can apply universally to other complex systems as long as the essential elements are in place: “Darwinism – the non-random selection of randomly varying replicating entities by reason of their ‘phenotypic’ effects – is the only force I know that can, in principle, guide evolution in the direction of adaptive complexity (Dawkins, 1983).” Mimicking this natural evolution process, the generation and evaluation of design alternatives in a wide range of design problems could follow a similar mechanism by utilizing an evolutionary strategy to generate and explore a large number of diverse design solutions at various stages of the design process, especially for problems with ill-defined objectives and specifications.

3.3 Computational Evolutionary Design One way to utilize the evolutionary strategy is to evolve a very large number of design solutions and evaluate this diverse set of solutions against the design criteria and see which solutions best fit. Theoretically, each successive generation of evolutionary designs takes the solutions set closer and closer to satisfying the design criteria. These variations are brought about by the evolutionary pressure coming from the context of the design in question, i.e. the design evolves to achieve better fit with the context. Bentley argues that the evolutionary process “does not involve conscious design at all” and questions the evolutionary process as a true design process, “evolutionary design is simply a process capable of generating designs, it can never truly be called a designer (1999).” Computational evolutionary design is the field utilizing evolutionary techniques inspired by mechanisms from biological evolution such as natural selection, transmission and variation to find an optimal configuration and best fit design for a specific system within specific constraints. As the process is no longer focusing on only one design solution at any one time, this is where the computer becomes very helpful: to assist in working with a large collection or population of solutions at once. At present, designers and computer scientists world-wide are using and experimenting with computational evolutionary design strategies for the design of a wide array of fields (Bentley, 1999).

3.4 Stages of the Evolutionary Design Process The computer can take designs with different underlying ideas and evaluate them against the design criteria to see which ideas best serve the design context. The most suitable solutions from the first round of evolution would then be used as the parents in the next round to evolve another set of solutions by making different changes to them with the target of achieving better fit with the design criteria. These off-springs of the selected parents from the first round are basically variations of the original designs. Design solutions in this next generation would therefore contain desirable characteristics from their parent designs as well as other design features acquired through the evolution strategy. By selecting the most optimal designs from the previous generation to serve as the parent designs, desirable characteristics identified are transmitted to the next round and future generations. In this next generation of design solutions, there will be some solutions that satisfy the design criteria better than their parents because of the changes resulting from the evolution process, while others move further away from the set of “good-fit” solutions with their evolved changes. The solutions that best fit the design criteria would then in turn be selected to become the parent designs in the next round, and so on. The evolutionary design process described above can be broken down into three separate sub-processes resembling the three key ingredients for evolution. According to the theory of Universal Darwinism, there are three mandatory components in the growth process for evolution to take place, they are: transmission, variation and selection (Dawkins, 1983). Transmission refers to the reproduction of certain designs to produce next generation designs with an inheritance of the parent designs’ special features and characteristics, which is analogous to the transmission of the parents’ “design genes” to their off-springs. However, if all the parent designs’ are passed on to the generated designs, i.e. designs in every successive generations are exact replicas of their parents, there would be no changes and therefore no improvement from generation to generation. Any unfavorable changes in the environment can wipe out the whole species. This is why the second component, variation, is essential for evolution to occur. When the new designs inherit their parents’ characteristics with small variations each instead of being perfect copies, chances are some of them will be better suited to the environmental pressure and survives, which means passing selection to become parent designs. Their favorable “genes” will get to be transmitted to the future generations. And through each generation, further improvements will be made to the design. These stages would become an integral part in the formation of the framework and models for e-POD to be discussed in Section 5. The 2005 World Sustainable Building Conference, Tokyo, 27-29 September 2005 (SB05Tokyo) 4 Open Source Design 4.1 The Open Source Movement Popularized by the software Linux, open source code software allows all users to freely modify and redistribute the software thereby canvassing the opinions and ideas of all users, particularly those who may encounter the need for modification to the original version in their actual usage. Furthermore, by opening the source code – the principle design concepts – to the public for mass scrutiny, then any errors, bugs and undesirable aspects will be discovered at a much higher rate than when the process is doing privately by a few programmers. This means that the users are participating in perpetually fine-tuning what they use. In a sense, this is a kind of “condensed evolution” in which the only the useful and desirable characteristics are retained through the “natural selection” of actual users and the undesirable properties are gradually weeded out. In this sense, open source is more than just a means for programmers to come together to perfect a software, it “is an experiment in building a political economy – that is, system of sustainable value creation and a set of governance mechanism (Weber, 2004).” In participatory design, it is a governance system that holds together a community of designers made up of users and stakeholders, freely contributing to a collective design task.

4.2 The Open Source Definition Based on the Debain Software Guidelines, the interest group Open Source Initiative has put together the Open Source Definition as guidelines for open source software. There are ten conditions under the Open Source Definition that the software must meet in order to be considered for the label of open source and corresponding licenses (OSI, 2005), the following is a summary of the more relevant clauses:

4.2.1 Free Redistribution: the software can be freely given away or sold.

4.2.2 Source Code: the source code must either be included or freely obtainable.

4.2.3 Derived Works: redistribution of modifications must be allowed. 4.2.4 No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: no-one can be locked out.

4.2.5 Distribution of License: rights must apply to everyone who receives the program. Although the above definitions are written specifically for the control of software distribution under the spirit of the open source movement, most of it also applies to more general open source design in various fields. The keyword is “free”: free distribution, free participation, free modification, free transmission, and so on. Different guidelines maybe needed for different fields of design: buildings, urban planning, policy, etc. More importantly, many of the principles of the open source movement are complementary to those of evolutionary design: “The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs…We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits (OSI, 2005).”

4.3 Electronic Community and Open Source Governance As discussed in Section 2, there are both a pragmatic perspective and a political perspective to e-POD. Just as the previously section on evolutionary design explains the pragmatic aspects, what the Open Source Definition captures is the political aspects. Utilizing the internet to connect designers transcends the conventional structure and dynamics of a community, allowing its members to participate collectively in ways not possible before. “Each familiar species of public space had its actors, costumes and scripts. But the worldwide computer network – the electronic agora – subverts, displaces, and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community, and urban life…The Net is ambient – nowhere in particular but everywhere at once (Mitchell, 1995).” Since the limits of time and space are virtually removed with the arena for consensus building moved into cyberspace, an electronic participatory process allows “citizens” of the community to join in the process anytime, anywhere, thus openning up the arena manyfolds. “The internet provides citizens who are separated from each other by time and space a way to reconnect and become more concerned about each other and their society…Most of [the] evidence shows that they are doing so without the assistance of the media and political institutions (Davis, Elin & Reeher, 2002).” The open source governance structure thus possesses a number of essential features which fosters the development of a participatory planning and design platform. As an organizational form that supports asynchronous communication, it eliminates the need for cumbersome face-to-face forums where there are too many to mediate yet allows a far larger number of people to participate in the same debate transgressing over a longer period of time. Under the dynamics of the open source platform, “the discussion unfolds over an indefinite period, among dispersed participants who log in and out at arbitrary moments (Mitchell, 1995).” The 2005 World Sustainable Building Conference, Tokyo, 27-29 September 2005 (SB05Tokyo) 5 A Framework of Models for Evolutionary Participatory Open Design (ePOD) 5.1 Dawkins' Biomorph Experiment Before proceeding with the description of the proposed framework and models for evolutionary participatory open design (ePOD), we will first look at a wonderful experiment involving nothing more than a notebook computer with a touch sensitive screen in a shady part of the garden outlined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker : The experiment concerns the evolution of biomorph – the digital morphological representation of “creatures” created by Dawkins to illustrate Darwinian evolution – of a flower and its mutant progenies – off-springs with mutations. The computer will simultaneously display a range of mutant progeny of the biomorph, differing from it in shape and/or color pattern. I believe that bees, butterflies and other insects will visit the screen, and “choose” by bumping into a particular spot on the screen. When a certain number of choices have been logged, the computer will wipe the screen clean, “breed” from the preferred biomorph, and display the next generation of mutant progeny. I have high hopes that, over a large number of generations, the wild insects will actually cause the evolution, in the computer, of flowers. If they do, the computer flowers will have evolved under exactly the same selection pressures that caused real flowers to evolve in the wild (Dawkins, 1986). The experiment follows a very simple logic: the most popular flower, which is the one with the best chance of having its pollen transferred by the insects, gets to survive and bear off-springs with variations. After selection by the insects, there is a transmission of the desirable characteristics of the surviving biomorph in each of its mutant progenies. This process is remarkably similar to that of the Linux software phenomenon. The version of the software most used, or receiving the most “hits”, is the one that survives and gets “bred” by software programmers around the world into a whole new series of improved versions of the original software, i.e. a range of mutant progeny. Again, the three mandatory components for evolution to occur – transmission, variation, selection – are obvious in the Linux open source development.

5.2 The Stages of ePOD The above three essential components of evolution are three distinct stages in the overall cyclic process. The proposed ePOD framework for engaging users and stakeholders in the design of artifacts and systems follows these same stages. In nature, such elegant solutions are evolved over millions of years. In our situation, however, we cannot wait for that to happen, which would take a considerable amount of time even with the use of a computer. In computational evolutionary design, the process is typically given a head start by “seeding” the process with a few pre-determined designs (Bentley, 1999). This is the initialization stage to kick off the whole process. Once initialized, the process can be left to run indefinitely, creating generations and generations of design progenies, But let say the design is for an artifact for commercial consumption, e.g. a chair, then there needs to be an identifiable end to the process so that the design deemed to be most fit can be put into production. For some design tasks, a termination stage is required. In natural selection, extinction is the only way to end the evolutionary process (Bentley, 1999). Whether or not a termination stage is needed depends on whether the process is a finite game or an infinite game. Carse defines that there are two types of games: “a finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play (1986).” Designing for artifacts are predominantly finite games, where “winning” means finding the best solution that wins the evolutionary race. In this kind of games, a termination stage is required. On the other hand, designing for systems, such as urban design, may not need to end at all as a system needs to be constantly improved. This kind of evolutionary design can be an infinite game with design solutions periodically extracted from the process and implemented.

5.3 The Basic ePOD Framework From the previous sections, we have thus far established that the evolutionary design process comprises five stages: Initialization → Transmission → Variation → Selection → Termination (optional), with the stage termination optional. After initialization, the process will repeat in a cycle involving the middle three stages, repeatedly producing new generations of designs. Since only the middle three stages are continually repeated, our following discussion will focus on them only. In the evolutionary design processes described in Bentley’s book (1999), most utilizes the computer exclusively in all three stages of the process. This type of computational evolutionary design process is thus a purely automated operation, eliminating all human participation once the process is initialized. Although this process could be the least biased, but it is also the least participatory, thus not the ideal model for achieving our objectives. Participation of each of the stages of transmission, variation and selection in ePOD can therefore either be by computer of by human. The more computer involvement, the less prejudiced it is but also less participatory, and in the contrary, the more human involvement in these stages, the more participatory the process is. To measure the degree of human participation, ePOD adopts a matrix for levels of participation developed by Hamdi and Goethert to assist in the understanding of “where community involvement would be most necessary” for community planning and development (1997). The system is based on the distinction between the community and outsiders . The community consists of those members who are connected socially or spatially with the shared objective of achieving goals relating to that community. Despite their The 2005 World Sustainable Building Conference, Tokyo, 27-29 September 2005 (SB05Tokyo) common drive “to get things done”, they may have radically different views on the same issues. The outsiders are composed of those who are outside the community but nonetheless are sometimes charged with the responsibility of making decisions regarding the community on the community’s behalf. This group of people includes government officials, professionals and consultants, NGO representatives, etc. Hamdi and Goethert define five levels of participation based the proportion of community contribution to outsider contribution in the process – none, indirect, consultative, shared control, and full control (1997) :

5.3.1 None: The outsiders make all the decision with no involvement of the community.

5.3.2 Indirect: The outsiders still make all the decisions, but the community is “represented” through abstract information from secondary sources, such as reports, studies, demographic data, etc.

5.3.3 Consultative: The outsiders directly solicit information from the community and make decisions accordingly after interpreting and analyzing the information.

5.3.4 Shared Control: The outsiders and the community interact and take more or less an equal role in making decisions. Often, a core group of stakeholders may represent the community.

5.3.5 Full Control: The community takes full control in making decisions with the outsider turning into a resource for providing information and technical support. Any computational evolutionary design process can therefore be represented with a matrix charting the level of participation against the stages of the process (Figure 1). Only the cyclic stages of transmission, variation and selection are included in the matrix. The higher the level of participation, the higher up y-axis the process moves. The x-axis charts the flow of the stages of the process. As discussed before, full use of the computer to make decisions at any stage is the same as zero participation. Therefore, in the matrix framework, full computation lies lower in level of participation than none, which would at least has an outsider participating. For the most “democratic” process with full participation, the route depicting the progression from stage to stage will stay close to the top of the matrix. Bentley’s computational evolutionary design and Dawkins’ flower biomorph design experiment is charted in Figure 2 and Figure 3 respectively.

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 1: Mapping Levels of Participation with Stages of the Evolutionary Design Process Depicting a Fully “Democratic” Evolutionary Design Process; Figure 2: Bentley’s Computational Evolutionary Design Process

5.4 The Proposed ePOD Model Having established the framework for analyzing evolutionary design processes, the first question emerges: Is a “fully participatory” process with full control at all three stages (as depicted in Figure 2) with pure community involvement the most suitable model for all applying to urban planning and design problems? As already mentioned above, the sometimes highly complex and technical nature of issues pertaining to urban development and renewal that it is impossible the community alone can come up with feasible solutions. The participation of some outsiders – professional, practitioners, government officials, and in some cases, even private developers – would not only be beneficial, but essential, for the generation of best fit solutions. Equipped with unique knowledge and experience from their respective backgrounds mostly lacking in the community, these different agents are valuable contributors to the process. The key is to avoid their “highjacking” of the process by imposing their own interests and established professional practices and structures in the expense of the well-being of the community.

The 2005 World Sustainable Building Conference, Tokyo, 27-29 September 2005 (SB05Tokyo)

Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 3: Dawkins’ Flower Biomorph Evolutionary Design Experiment; Figure 4: The Proposed ePOD Model Out of the three stages of analyzed under the ePOD framework, both the transmission and variation stages mandate relatively higher technical understanding than the selection stage. Considerable professional input is required to dissect the various aspects of a solution and identify the defining characteristics of the selected designs. The decision of which one(s) of these characteristics that the progeny designs would inherit from their parents is the key task of the transmission stage. It would be too ambitious to insist full control level participation by the community for this crucial stage. Similarly, introduction of variations to the parent designs requires actual designing , which is also a difficult task for layman without outsider support. These two stages together forms the reproduction portion of the ePOD process, which Bentley (1999) describes as “the cornerstone of every evolutionary.” Both of these stages would benefit from a shared control mode, with outsiders interacting with the community as equal stakeholders (Hamdi & Goethert, 1997) in coming up with innovative decisions and designs options. This would be done both online via the internet and offline in facilitated sessions. Taking advantage of the internet, the community would make suggestions and ask questions by submission through the website, which could be reviewed anytime by others. In time, participating outsiders or members of the community would provide further information or answer some of the deposited questions. All these would become public information accessible by all on the website. To make the ePOD process successful, all participants must follow the developments of the design evolution and go through the information as much as possible. For the transmission stage, the defining characteristics (i.e. the source code or genetics) of the selected parent designs would be identified by participating consultants and uploaded with explanations and justifications onto the website. The community could then vote for or against the consultants’ proposals, which would be passed when a preset percentage of votes (e.g. 75%) is reached over a fixed voting period. Members of the community are required to include their reasons behind their votes for the consultants’ use if they need to refine their proposals on inheritance. For the variation stage, the initial part of this stage would see the community and outsiders “floating” designs, with variations based on the identified defining characteristics, on the website for comments and refinements. This would create a dialogue among the participants. The final decision of for the variation stage would be made in facilitated design-charette sessions where members of the community and outsiders come together in a venue and generate off-spring designs face-to-face. In the selection stage, the community simply votes on the design solutions generated by the design charettes. The design solutions can be viewed on the website, with all relevant information and its development history linked. In this stage, only the community can vote and their votes will be registered and tabulated via the website. The progression of the proposed ePOD model is depicted in Figure 4. It is encouraging to know that similar online voting system is already up and running. In Estonia, citizens can comment on draft laws as well as submit their own suggestions on alternatives for a public vote through the public website “Today I Decide”, which averages over 150,000 hits per month. Relevant government authorities would consider suggestions that receive a majority of the votes and sometimes these suggestions are even enacted into law. 6 Conclusion At present, both authority-led and interest group-led forums, consultations, workshops and decision-making hearings have always been subject to physical limits in space, time and numbers of participants. A digital environment interconnected through the internet – a present cyberspace version of the ancient Greek Agora – can act as the platform for full democratic real-time participation in official decisions by all stakeholders with regards to public design and planning decisions. Online and practices can enable architects and planners to overcome such constraints limiting the number of participants to involve a much higher number The 2005 World Sustainable Building Conference, Tokyo, 27-29 September 2005 (SB05Tokyo) of the public over a longer period of time to evolve a design or plan until reaches consensus where all concerns are being examined and mediated in transparent and accountable ways. This paper introduces a proposal for a design process resembling the development of open source code software in the internet by making open a planning/design proposal in a website and allow the public, and potentially other designers and planners, to amend the design and/or suggest changes that may lead to design amendments. It is the hypothesis of this paper that this process, if designed properly, can not only generate better solutions to design and planning problems through the involvement of a much higher number of “designers” and “planners” participating in the process, but can also integrate public preferences into the solutions in a far more open, informed, equal and interactive manner than any other existing means of involving the public in design and planning. In this process, participants are constantly getting feedback on their own ideas as well as learning new information on their own or others’ design solutions. By acquiring knowledge through collective participation, the open source designers are continually improving their own design problem solving skills so that they are not only producing better and better design solutions but are also becoming better and better designers themselves. 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