Methodological Approaches to Reflect on the Relationships Between People, Spaces, Technologies

Social behaviour in public spaces has changed over the time and has become attractive to all those involved in designing people's spaces. Communities in different countries in Europe have shown more and more interest and various activities have started to shape the public spaces all around the world. The main objective of the chapter is to review development of the methodologies that have been used to analyse public spaces worldwide and to summarize their requirements and conditions to suggest how they can be applied in order to analyse the relationship between people and spaces, with the aim to boost the active participation of people in the design process. The chapter describes the methodologies using ICTs, especially e-participation, mobile technologies, GIS systems, or on the methods increasing the attractiveness of the public open spaces for citizens and visitors (laser holograms, QR codes, interactive boards, online and interactive maps, questionnaires and social interaction, etc.). Information technology offers new potentials of citizen participation and provides a communication platform, which suppresses a barrier of non-professionalism, allowing for distant contacts and enabling participatory process management. Users, accustomed to communicating through ICT also in public spaces, feel by using this tool more anonymous and less harassed to express their opinion. Not only ICT are important in the 21st century society, but also new ways of social media, which are accessible/open to using for a larger group of people. The institutions or municipalities could use them as a semi-official information platform, public open discussion forums or resource of the public initiatives.