Abstract
“Community Now?” is a bilateral, German-Israeli cooperation that researches ways of providing access and facilitating alternative forms of debate and engagement from a design research perspective – especially with regards to socio-political processes in urban environments. Embracing the “social turn” ii within the field of design and the related challenges, the project’s overarching goal is the inclusion of a wide range of citizens in societal and political decision-making processes that are increasingly becoming digitized. The digitization of such processes fosters participation, but also entails a digital divide that builds on unequal access of individuals to ICTs. Consequently the project aims at activating and empowering those who are passive or marginalized to take on ownership.
In the last two years, numerous spaces and frameworks, tools and interventions have been created as researchers, students and local partners from both countries collectively worked on these interrelated topics, leading to the development of contextualized tools for urban explorations.
At the base of the endeavor to develop hybrid tools in a participatory and inclusive way lies the Living Lab approach. With “Community Now?” we explore both the possibilities and the restrictions of such an approach. In this paper, we present and contextualize the tools and processes that have been developed and implemented during the course of the cooperation in Berlin, at the Living Lab Mehringplatz, Kreuzberg, as well as in Jerusalem in the neighborhood of the bilingual, Arabic-Hebrew Max Rayne Hand in Hand School.