Report on the First Participatory Design Workshop of Terra Mosana

As part of Terra Mosana, a euregional project aiming to investigate, digitise and communicate the shared history of the Meuse-Rhine Euregion, several participatory design workshops are organised in different cities of the Meuse-Rhine Euregion. The goal of the workshops is to engage citizens in the design activities of Terra Mosana storylines. In February 2020, around eighteen project partners and twenty-two master’s students from the international master’s programme of Arts and Heritage and the Dutch program Kunst, Cultuur en Erfgoed (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University) contributed to the pilot participatory design workshop.

In order to engage participants in the history of the Euregion and to gain creative ideas about how this shared history might be communicated to the public, participants were invited to conduct several group activities. Such as (1) card sorting using a standard template in order to prioritise the themes of the project, as well as to discover what provokes participants in their preferred theme. After that, (2) a storyboarding activity was designed to build and visualise a sequential narrative about how the chosen theme can be communicated to the public in an interactive way. They concluded with (3) building mock-ups activity using everyday materials, provoking participants to express their ideas in a physical form. Each group was then invited to briefly present their ideas about how they sorted the themes, their persona, which they developed during the workshop, and the scenario of their expected experience.

Themes such as immaterial heritage, migration, and languages were the most preferred by participants, while themes such as mobility, central places, and religious infrastructure were the least preferred. Each group built their scenario based on a specific theme and a unique persona that varied in terms of age, gender, occupation and origin, reflecting a diverse representation of the real target audience. Since most of the participants in this workshop were international students, it would be interesting to see how differently the local people of the Euregion sort the themes in the upcoming workshops.

Further workshops are planned for Maastricht and Tongeren (September 2020), Liege (October 2020) and Aachen (t.b.a.). In response to the COVID-19 safety measures, all workshops will take place online. In order to facilitate this, an alternative online participatory design scenario has been developed by the coordinator of the participatory workshops, Eslam Nofal. In due course, the toolkit and guidelines for organising such (online) participatory design workshops will be made available on the project website.