Large-scale participation: a case study of a participatory approach to developing a new public library

In this paper, we present a case study of a participatory project that focuses on interaction in large-scale design, namely, the development of the new Urban Mediaspace Aarhus. This project, which has been under way for ten years, embodies a series of issues that arise when participatory design approaches are applied to large-scale, IT-oriented projects. At the same time, it highlights the issues public knowledge institutions face, when interactive technologies challenge their fundamental roles and practices; by extension, this case offers examples of how these challenges may be explored and addressed through IT-based participatory initiatives. We present a range of such activities carried out during the past ten years, and present the main lessons from the project, based on interviews with three key stakeholders. These lessons focus on how to make participation work in practice, how to align different paradigms of inquiry and practice in a project of this scale, and how to capture and anchor the insights from participatory events to inform the ongoing design process.