Abstract:
In interactive art practice and community-based urban development, user
participation plays a key role in the development phase of a project. The
present paper draws on experience from our work in these two fields to
analyse the role of participation in interactive systems as a form of
cooperation assisting the ongoing design of system structure. A system is a
complex of interacting and interrelated components. Relationships within the
system, or the structure, define and generate behaviours between human
participant(s) and other components of an art or urban environment. While
urban development and interactive art deal with participation in differing
contexts and scales, the goal of the practitioner is consistent: the construction
of a system that enables and maintains meaningful interaction towards some
goal. The aim of this paper is to compare observations from our works at
both the art-lab and urban scales, and to characterize the symbiotic
relationship between user participation and system design. The comparison
of these two diverse fields provides unique insight into this relationship.
