Public Gratification Palace: A Framework for Increased Civic Engagement

As popularly mentioned, the successful practice of urban design and planning is limited when only designers and local business or governmental institutions participate in the design and implementation of public infrastructure, placemaking and policy development. Public design cannot be a one-time event nor permanently static because community engagement ought to be a recurrent and consistent activity, in fostering the growth and sustainability of the community. Since the 1960s, there have been initiatives to democratize urban planning practices, and more recently, these initiatives have continued in this modality of citizen designer and empowerment through the implementation of media architecture, spatial blogging, and co-creation through crowdsourcing. As a conceptual framework, the Public Gratification Palace suggests a co-creative design methodology to increase civic engagement using the familiarity and intuitiveness of mobile device usage and social media platforms; thus, supporting voices of the digital literate community. Through cybernetic principles, this framework utilizes gratification methods akin to the ones used in social media to enhance user experience and continued participation. Geo-located instant gratification, as the process of attaching geographical metadata to digital media, will provide all stakeholders (e.g., local public, spatial planners and designers, and city governments) with feedback, crowd approval/disapproval and/or proposals for the design and implementation of public infrastructure as well as policies. Consequently, location-based social interactions and information exchange will increase in-situ civic engagement and community building through the networks of geo-tagging.