Repairing the Courtyard: Computational Participation, Cultural Care, and Design Justice in Bangkok

Abstract

This study advances a theory-in-practice framework for community participation that integrates right-to-repair ethics, environmental justice, and cultural health into the design of semi-public courtyards in Bangkok. Building on mixed-methods fieldwork, we compared two participation instruments, on-site illustration and a lightweight browser-based voxel editor, to examine how tools mediate design cognition, inclusivity, and the aesthetics of shared spatial order. We argue that participation should not be reduced to consultation or delegated “design-by-community,” but structured as co-production in which computational legibility and lived, affective knowledge are equally first class. Empirically, 16 participants across four focus groups generated courtyard proposals that revealed complementary strengths: analog drawing elicited memory, ritual, and “care programs” rooted in Thai social life, while the voxel tool supported iterative composition, rule clarity, and post-hoc measurement. We report quantitative engagement metrics and qualitative thematic codes and then propose a repair-oriented workflow that translates narrative sketches into computable models without erasing cultural nuances. The result is a reproducible method that helps local governments and citizen groups negotiate between bottom-up claims and top-down constraints, positioning participation as an instrument of spatial justice rather than as a stylistic add-on.