Using and supporting explicit viewpoints in territorial participatory design meetings
Résumé
As part of an R&D project exploring ways to define and locally experiment with the « transition to Territorial AgroEcological System », researchers and rural stakeholders (policymakers and farmers) organised territorial participatory design (TPD) workshops. Several meetings were held to redesign rules and actions regarding specific small territories located in the south of France. During these meetings, the participants explored objectives, problems, farming models and geolocated solutions to rethink the agricultural production process. TPD on this topic is especially challenging because the actors who are projecting their activities into the future use uncertain knowledge and confront many viewpoints and hypothetical or controversial dimensions (e.g., farming systems, natural resources, food chains). To facilitate multi-viewpoint TPD, we propose an Explicit ViewPoints (EVP) model. Viewpoints are conventional artefacts that are reified by a label and a set of associations with, e.g., places, dates, and personal assignations as parts of a TPD socio-technical device. The EVP model that we present here is related to both organisational and knowledge purposes: it allows the adequate organisation of TPD activities and agendas and supports knowledge sharing, capitalising, annotating and category-building with respect to the plurality of semantics of the TPD actors. We describe how it is currently experienced by rural actors in agroecology design, specifically in face-to-face meetings using classical maps and paper devices. Then, we propose guidelines for our work (in progress) aimed at supporting Viewpoint-based TPD with software tools (supporting meeting recording, annotation, information retrieval, and cross-viewpoints visualisation) during the TPD process. According to (Cahier et al., 2013), this ICT infrastructure must encourage the autonomy of concurrent viewpoints and categories without weighing down the design with unnecessary formality.