Middle-out Toe-eigening: De Impact van Placemaking Interfaces op alle Civiele Belanghebbenden

Placemaking describes a collaborative process in which different stakeholders conjoin their local knowledge to (re)shape public space with the aim to tackle contemporary issues, that range from social imbalances, over traffic congestion, until environmental pollution. So-called 'placemaking interfaces', such as mobile apps or interactive displays that are located around opportunistic encounters in public space, invite these stakeholders to share their local knowledge by way of polls, surveys or qualitative inputs. However, most placemaking interfaces are designed to be facilitated from the top-down by governmental or corporate organisations, hereby ignoring the agency of bottom-up citizens to potentially co-design the location, content or timing of the deployments. While middle-out placemaking has been proposed as a novel civic participation approach that tackles these issues by involving the joint knowledge of both top-down and bottom-up stakeholders, very few tools exist, and little is known whether they indeed increase the agency of all stakeholders. Situated within the ITEA3 funded CityStory project, this dissertation reports on three distinct interfaces that were specifically designed to facilitate placemaking from the middle-out. Particularly, this work presents empirical insights into how middle-out placemaking interfaces where appropriated by different civic stakeholder groups and how this process empowered or restricted their civic agency. The research encompasses a comprehensive literature review and evaluates the impact of these interfaces across eight real-world use-case scenarios involving 24 different civic stakeholders, in the form of four in-the-wild studies: • 'A Critical Review of how Public Display Interfaces Facilitate Placemaking' systematically analysed the infrastructural concepts, methods and tools of 40 existing placemaking interface deployments as reported in scientific literature. This chapter discusses five 'middle-out' considerations of how future placemaking interface practice should leverage the agency of top-down and bottom-up stakeholders. • 'The Stakeholder Perspective on Using Public Polling Displays for Civic Engagement' investigates the value of a placemaking interface from the perspective of 10 civic organisations that reflect on four deployments. The chapter proposes a descriptive model that synthesises the individual deployment activities by the involved facilitators, as well as eight specific challenges that emerged throughout the process. • 'PosterTalk: Expanding Participatory Agency in Public Survey Platforms via Middle-Out Gatekeeping' reports on the design and deployment of a novel placemaking interface for middle-out placemaking. By critically analysing the actions of the involved facilitators, this chapter proposes a framework to benchmark civic agency in placemaking interface deployments and four guidelines to improve middle-out appropriation. • 'The StoryMapper: Piloting a Traveling Placemaking Interface for Inclusion and Emplacement' reports on the impact of sharing a hybrid placemaking interface among civic stakeholders. This chapter discusses multiple guidelines for the design of citizen-driven recruitment processes and the role of multimodality in placemaking. • 'Middle-out Surveying: How Placemaking Interface Deployments Impact Civic Organisations' investigates the concurrent deployment of two placemaking interfaces across three civic engagement use-cases. The chapter discusses the interrelation between the interface and the involved stakeholders, including the researchers themselves. Accordingly, this thesis contributes: (1) three novel working prototypes of placemaking interfaces; (2) eight in-the-wild deployments initiated and executed by real-world middle-out stakeholders; (3) a comprehensive Placemaking Interface Appropriation Framework (PIAF), including (4) a series of critical considerations for the future design of (middle-out) placemaking interface deployments that are more inclusive, accountable and valuable. Finally, it discusses five areas of friction within these considerations, and concludes with reflections on the role of the researcher, offering advice for novice researchers in the fields of human computer interaction and placemaking.