Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Digital Participation - A framework to evaluate participation in urban design processes

Abstract

Data-driven urban design processes consist of iterative actions of many stakeholders, which require digital participatory approaches for collecting data from a high number of participants to make informed decisions. It is important to evaluate such processes to justify the necessary costs and efforts while continuously improving digital participation. Nevertheless, such evaluation remains a challenge due to the involvement of different stakeholders including participants, designers, and policymakers in decision-making processes, and the lack of a systematic method to generalize participation outputs that are mostly situated and context based. By addressing this challenge, this paper introduces a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) based framework to measure the effectiveness and quality of digital participation systematically and quantitatively. To achieve such evaluation, we conducted a digital participation experiment and investigated such processes with the help of participants, designers, and policymakers from Singapore and Hamburg. By formulating this framework, we aim to reveal perspectives of different stakeholders towards digital participation and enable the evaluation and comparison of digital participation processes based on the introduced digital participation criteria.