This graduation project is a collaboration between the Inclusive City Hub (part of Delft Design Labs) and the Gemeente Delft. This project focuses on the topic of participation for creating people–centered cities. The initial problem definition of the project was to understand how the municipality of Delft can design with the people of the city by moving towards a participatory approach such that they can address the needs of people at optimal moments during the process.

Based on the analysis and findings from research the problem addressed by this project was redefined. The redefined problem was how can we reduce the threshold of the municipality to embrace and adopt participation as a part of their daily way of working. From this question the two problem areas to be addressed were defined as; one, a lack in ability of the municipality to act on participatory frameworks and two, a lack of willingness of the municipality to make participation a part of their culture.

The resulting solution and final outcome proposed was to design a sensitizing participation journal or booklet for use by the people working in the municipality. The main goal of this journal is to equip folks at the municipality to act on the participatory framework of Delfts Doen by means of the tools provided in it. The journal also hopes to inspire and sensitize the municipality about participation, paving the way to increase the willingness and bring about a culture change in the municipality regarding participation.

To conclude, the challenges with participatory design lie in the adoption of a new mindset within large organizations such as municipalities, since this mindset strongly challenges the existing power structure and hierarchy within an organization. It is expected that the findings of this thesis can contribute to this knowledge by building on how these challenges can be overcome by focusing on the needs that must be fulfilled for people working in organizations such as municipalities.