Technology is more and more providing planners and designer with tools and methods to collect and communicate spatial data and assist spatial analysis. When we think about new technologies supporting planning we mainly think about GIS, urban modelling, simulation models and virtual reality. But many other challenges to the planning practice need for tools to support and improve planning activit...

Many forest planning situations are complex; multiple criteria of different natures have to be considered and several stakeholders or social groups may be involved. An approach that is increasingly used in these complex situations is the combination of multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) and participatory planning. A crucial part of MCDA processes involving more than one decision maker i...

Participatory design must be more than the formality of having users present or even engaged in “dialogue.” Participatory design is a communicative process prone to miscommunications like those in cross-cultural settings. While team members may belong to the same general culture, their varying occupational and social contexts are subcultures that bring different background assumptions, conventi...

OBJECTIVES This health promotion project used participatory processes to engage all stakeholders to design and pilot preventive health tools in partnership with and for individuals with incarceration experience. This article outlines the methods of engaging with this marginalized population and interventions conducted to successfully utilize participation in the planning phases of the project t...

The use of participatory design is often advocated when developing new solutions for economically or socially marginalised people in developing countries (see for example Arce, 2004; Sharma et al., 2008). It is argued that through including users in the design process designers can understand their needs better (Arce, 2004). Yet, few studies address the real-life challenges of doing participato...

BACKGROUND Influenza outbreaks affect millions of people every year and its surveillance is usually carried out in developed countries through a network of sentinel doctors who report the weekly number of Influenza-like Illness cases observed among the visited patients. Monitoring and forecasting the evolution of these outbreaks supports decision makers in designing effective interventions and ...

This article aimed at finding out if participatory processes (group discussions, enactments, and others) do make a valuable contribution in communication-based project implementation/evaluation and the fight against HIV/AIDS. A case study backed by documentary analysis of evaluation reports and occasional insights from interviews stood as the main methods. To identify values, the state of benef...

We propose that participatory GIS (PGIS) activities including participatory urban planning can be made more efficient and effective if spatial reasoning rules are integrated with PGIS tools to simplify engagement for public contributors. Spatial reasoning is used to describe relationships between spatial entities. These relationships can be evaluated quantitatively or qualitatively using geomet...

background: community-based participatory research (cbpr) increasingly is being used to address health issues. few evidence exist to indicate how builds the capacity of communities to function as health promoter and what resources are required to promote successful efforts. this article presents the result of a capacity assessment for preventing drug abuse through cbpr, which working with rathe...