Designing for Robustness and Fragility: A Field Evaluation of an Urban Mobility Co-Design Canvas

Abstract

Participatory Design (PD) is an approach to design in which those affected by a system or service actively participate in its creation, rather than simply being positioned as end users or informants. In practice, PD is often implemented through structured methods and toolkits that guide collaborative design activities; therefore, these toolkits are central to the implementation and study of PD. However, PD toolkits are typically evaluated through iterative testing led by their original design teams. Their use by independent facilitation teams in different contexts is not well understood. This paper evaluates the Urban Mobility Co-Design Canvas (UMCDC), a co-design toolkit deployed in ten cities. We conducted a qualitative multi-case study of workshops facilitated by independent local teams to examine how the toolkit is used in practice. The toolkit was decomposed into six design elements, categorized as adopted, adapted, or replaced, based on facilitator accounts and workshop documentation. We then compared these patterns with respect to participant composition, group size, and facilitation format. Our findings show that the portability of the toolkit varies across the six design elements, rather than being uniform at the toolkit level. The primary contribution is a methodological procedure for evaluating participatory toolkits in distributed deployments. Applying it yields two further contributions: an empirical account of which UMCDC elements are robust or fragile and under which contextual conditions, and design principles for co-design toolkits that balance cross-context consistency with local adaptability.