Democratic design means different things to different people. To furniture giant Ikea, democratic design means offering affordable designed products to people of all incomes. To others, especially in urban design, democratic design is empowering communities to design their own urban parks and space. The suggestion here is that the public realm is literally designed by the public. In our eyes, democratic design is a much broader term. It can be understood as simply a measure of inclusivity, engagement, access and impact that stakeholders are offered upon a design process. Every project therefore has an innate or implied design democracy underpinning the design process, and some projects inevitably appear more democratic than others. At the basic level therefore, a project’s design democracy should be well considered and managed to de-risk a project and deliver maximum return on investment. There is a type of design democracy or level of implementation that will be right for a particular project, return most value and for some projects, democratic design approaches will be indispensable. Collaborative, inclusive and participatory design approaches can all be part of implementing a design democracy within a project. These are all vunerable to mere tick box approaches, especially where public consultation programmes are seen as just another project deliverable and there is no real continuity established between design progress and end user feedback. Collaboration and engagement for built environment projects require genuine support, management and continuous measure to ensure that there is a real return on the investment and design remains user centric. Effective design democracy management involves the consideration of the type of democracy to be implemented for a particular project, and a detailed appreciation of the underlying architecture of the collaboration and feedback exchange between project consultants, stakeholders and end users. Projects without any end user impact on the design process risk rejection by these end users. This is so often the case with built environment projects, where end users can often be excluded from the design process, especially in speculative development. The larger and more obvious project risk of course lies in alienation of local communities and objections are then inevitably raised at planning stages. So the risk to a client of ignoring or getting their design democracy wrong is considerable. We think it is better to de-risk projects by establishing a smart and deliberate design democracy. Clients should take charge of the design democracy at the earliest stage of projects and reap the benefits possible by opening up dialogue and engagement to locals, end users as well as enhancing the collaboration of their consultant team.
