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Collective decision-making in civic design contexts is often structured around surface-level consensus, such as idea popularity, which can obscure the diverse values that underlie community preferences. In this paper, we investigate how foregrounding shared values impacts the convergence phase of a community design process. We conducted a within-subjects experiment (n=24) using a design probe that simulates a civic decision-making task for a local recreational park. Participants engaged in three conditions, counterbalanced for order, that varied the extent to which personal values were identified before voting. Through surveys and interviews, we found that value conditions significantly increased participants’ sense of inclusion, alignment with community values, and willingness to compromise, without increasing perceived effort. Participants reported that value-centered framing helped them interpret others’ priorities, reflect on their own, and feel more connected to the broader community. These findings contribute to the design of civic technologies by demonstrating how lightweight value-centered scaffolding can support deeper deliberation, shared understanding, and more equitable public input.
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Participatory Convergence: Integrating Convergence and Participatory Action Research
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Non-technical summaryImproving the flow of information between governments and local communities is paramount to achieving effective climate change mitigation and adaptation. We propose five pathways to deepen participation and improve community-based climate action. The pathways can be summarized as visualization, simulations to practice decision-making, participatory budgeting and planning, environmental civic service, and education and curriculum development. These pathways contribute to improving governance by consolidating in governments the practice of soliciting and incorporating community participation while simultaneously giving communities the tools and knowledge needed to become active contributors to climate change adaptation and mitigation measures. Technical summaryCommunity participation is considered a key component in the design of responses to climate change. Substantial engagement of local communities is required to ensure information flow between governments and communities, but also because local communities are the primary sites of adaptation action. However, frontline communities are often excluded from decision-making and implementation processes due to political choices or failures to identify ways to make participatory frameworks more inclusive. Climate action requires the active engagement of communities in making consequential decisions, or what we termdeepened participation. We propose five pathways to deepen participation: visualization, simulations to practice decision-making, participatory budgeting and planning, environmental civic service, and education and curriculum development. The five pathways identify strategies that can be incorporated into existing organizational and institutional frameworks or used to create new ones. Shortcomings related to each strategy are identified. Reflection by communities and governments is encouraged as they choose which participatory technique(s) to adopt. Social media summaryClimate action requires the active engagement of communities. Learn five pathways to get started deepening participation.more » « less
