The urban landscape is a reflection of social ideology and behaviors. People’s values, behavior patterns and social relationships are all straight forwardly stated in the urban landscape. If designers can create the environment, and at the same time, the environment creates the consciousness of people, then the important social responsibility of urban designers is to promote strong participation of users through the design of public places. We believe that the essence of public space is that people and others are in an interdependent and mutually-constructed relationship, and acting together or living together to form collective existence. Reflecting upon open space design of the new era today, in order to realize human-centered design ideology, we must start from today’s background understanding that includes self-identity value, photo-sharing culture, and social networking, based on the premise of precise users.

▼项目俯瞰，Top view ©南西空间影像

The project’s retail rooftop is located on Wuchang Qingnian Road in Wuhan. The client hopes to transform the roof into a regional landmark that attracts young people to visit here, and FLO took this opportunity to participate in the design process from ideation to site implementation. Due to lack of retail interface adjacent to our rooftop and lack of accessibility of the roof from lower levels, the primary challenge is how to create a highly functional and attractive space to attract visitors. In addition, how to integrate user needs with the basic conditions of the site with a unified identity is also one of the other main challenges in this project.

Participatory landscape, as the name suggests, should be focused on users emphasizing diversity, interaction, and a sense of belonging. Traditional participatory thinking tend to cater for preferences of all age groups and interest groups to satisfy broad user groups. Consequently, designers tend to provide corresponding functions and facilities without in-depth study of human behaviors. This traditional design approach brings several problems: First: Weak Spatial Correlation. Designers intentionally allocate diverse functions to satisfy all kinds of potential users, and at the same time, the relationship between function areas is weak, which leads to spatial fragmentation; Second: Weak Identity Recognition. Due to lack of specificity of activity scenes, each scene is less strong in identity and therefore less likely to attract any targeted user; Third: Weak Culture. Sense of collective identity and belonging creates social cohesiveness of space. However, traditional participatory approach makes it difficult for people to form collective consciousness to generate any certain kind of culture.

The purpose of the New Participatory Design Thinking is to solve those problems. Its main strategy is to identify precise targeted user and generate peripheral impacts of diversified public behaviors. On this basis, the design aims to maximize tailored place-making to enhance social binding and generate a strong culture. The user-centered approach can potentially attract wider range of interest groups and trigger diverse spatial and behavioral relationships.