Participatory design research
Measuring what participation actually produces in architecture.
Participation in architecture is widely advocated and rarely measured. Benjamin Loiseau, architect and researcher, builds instruments that make it accountable: a coding protocol for what inhabitants say in workshops, and a participation depth index that scores each proposal on five dimensions — redundancy, trajectory, diversity of contributors, user anchoring, argumentative construction.
The instruments come from a single, unusually long fieldwork: Grand’Goule, a 274-unit social housing estate in Poitiers, followed from 1974 to 2024. Fifty years, two participatory episodes forty years apart, one building. The doctoral thesis was defended in July 2024 at HESAM Université, under a CIFRE agreement with Architecturestudio and the MAACC-MAP and i3 laboratories.
ORCID 0000-0002-5894-8908 · HAL · Google Scholar · version française
The participation depth index
Five dimensions, one score per proposal.
Every statement produced in a workshop is transcribed and coded: who said it, in which exchange format, and what kind of discourse it belongs to. Each proposal is then scored on redundancy, the path it travelled through the design process, the number and diversity of actors who carried it, how firmly it is anchored in inhabitants’ experience, and how far it was argued rather than asserted.
Applied to eighty proposals in a renovation project, the index shows that heavily participated proposals tend to be incorporated into the scheme, and usually without significant additional cost. That result matters to social landlords: it removes the main objection to funding a serious consultation process.
Grand’Goule, Poitiers, 1974-2024
274 social housing units, two participatory episodes, fifty years apart.
Built at the end of the 1970s by Architecturestudio as an experimental operation of the French Plan Construction, the estate was designed around Shared Activity Areas, deliberately displacing the boundary between private and public space. The family unit as the basic module of dwelling was explicitly put into question.
Forty years later the estate was renovated, again with its inhabitants. The same building, two doctrines of participation, two generations of residents. This longitudinal depth is what makes the case unusual: it allows the question of what survives of a participatory intention once it is embedded in matter.
Peer-reviewed publications
Open access wherever the publisher allows it.
CONFERENCE PAPERS
Loiseau, B., & Safin, S. Qualities of statements according to exchange formats in a participatory design project. ModACT, 4. Best paper award. full text
Loiseau, B., Tarasenka, D., & Safin, S. Representing participation depth: formal explorations and potential. ModACT, 3, 165-176. full text
DOCTORAL THESIS
Loiseau, B. Effects and limits of participation in architecture: the Grand’Goule social housing estate in Poitiers, 1974-2024. PhD, HESAM Université. full text
A cycle at the Académie d’architecture
Four buildings, four round tables, one day.
In November 2022, at the Académie d’architecture in Paris, four housing operations designed with their inhabitants were brought back for assessment years after delivery: an self-promoted conversion of an industrial laundry in Paris, a social housing scheme by atelier Construire in Ardèche, a co-housing group in the Drôme, and Grand’Goule. Inhabitants, clients, architects and researchers, each in front of the others.
The cycle was conceived and organised by Benjamin Loiseau within Architecturestudio, where he was then conducting his CIFRE doctoral research. The four filmed sessions are available.
A site,a method,a paper ?
MANO runs participatory design processes and measures their effects. Landlords, local authorities and research groups are welcome to open a fieldwork.