Public engagement is a relationship building exercise.

Public engagement is a relationship building exercise. 

It is not just about collecting data. 

Data changes, it morphs, it adjusts depending on how it is collected and further as people get to know each other. 

Engagement is about building connections for multiple reasons. Engagement means that we find better data. It means that we ask the right questions, and it means that we build the human resources to actually carry out a new vision. It creates vision. It provides us with more than we put in. Without engagement there is no human network able to conceive of, let alone build something new.

Buildings and environments are physical manifestations of our societal values. 

This is why I find over emphasis on online surveys risky. They do very little to create connections and I think it is really difficult to get important information from them because you have no idea how much people know or what they are responding to. 

My preference at this point is for a multi-tiered approach that includes data collection, observation, large surveys, followed by interviews with experts, further face-to-face meetings and usability testing. Small focus groups are good as well as experiments and developing new methods to test out ideas. 

Too much focus on getting everyone in a room when there is no communal vision or relevant understanding is not helpful in my opinion, nor is too much reliance on technology, or superficial means to get surface level data.

Some of my current readings include:

Clark, A, and P Moss. 2012. Listening to Young Children: The Mosaic Approach. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Burke, Catherine. 2007. “The View of the Child: Releasing ‘visual Voices’ in the Design of Learning Environments.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 28 (3): 359–72.

Malczewski, Jacek, and Claus Rinner. 2015. “Multicriteria Decision Analysis in Geographic Information Science.” In Analysis Methods, 331.

Ferretti, Valentina, and Gilberto Montibeller. 2016. “Key Challenges and Meta-Choices in Designing and Applying Multi-Criteria Spatial Decision Support Systems.” Decision Support Systems 84: 41–52.