This study examines the application of participatory design in the workplace, with a particular emphasis on its effects on the workers’ output, contentment, and perception of the organization’s culture. Using the PRISMA framework, 42 studies were reviewed across the fields of design, environmental psychology, and organizational management. Productivity improves through autonomy, psychological and physical well-being improves, and more inclusive workplace cultures are developed. Empowering employees, the participatory design lets them take part in the and decision ergonomic making needs, of which the physical stress workspace, and enhances well-being. This increase is motivation because and post-pandemic productivity. hybrid Also addressed are psychological work models that may be most effective at enhancing employee-centered and adaptable spaces that combine collaboration and autonomy. Such workspaces could be created through participatory design. Additionally, it may cultivate enhanced organizational culture and increased workplace inclusivity by enhancing listening for diverse voices. However, the review of participatory design is not without its limitations. There is a lack of longitudinal studies that can offer a perspective on the effects in the long run, methods for equitable participation in hybrid and remote work environments, and models that can be easily extended to large organizations. Participatory design can be enhanced by integrating emerging technologies, such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence, to address these challenges. The study reveals that designing sustainable, inclusive, and adaptable workplaces through participatory design is possible. In addressing the gaps identified and advancing the research, participatory design can serve as a crucial enabler of equity and sustainability goals in rapidly changing work environments.

Architecture was, and is, a patronage-based practice (Crawford, 1991) – a reality that has had a profound impact upon the patterns of engagement adopted by the architect: linear and hierarchical processes, a carefully curated client base, methods of valuation prioritizing exclusivity and a sharp focus on the production of symbolic capital. Although not without merit, these patterns become problematic when the architect attempts to forge robust, community-based design efforts and create a sustained address to the emerging challenges faced by society’s most vulnerable (Surwiecki, 2005).

To be effective here, the architect must critically examine their field’s historic prejudice and formulate new, more inclusive, patterns of engagement (Freire, 2010). Else old patterns will persist, causing the architect to impose normative design practice, with its biases, upon constituencies historically disadvantaged by them and generate the kind of “malevolent urbanism” such processes naturally create (Jacobson, 2010 and Theime & Kovaks, 2015). Conversely, if the architect can formulate new patterns, then they may be able to offer their skills and training to those who need them most.

This paper will investigate how this reformulation might occur by analyzing three recently-completed, small-scale design actions. Built of mostly scavenged means in only a few days with budgets of under a few thousand dollars, each of these modest projects was realized using a unique, socially-responsive approach to design, construction, and evaluation. From crowdsourcing to hyper-local peer-to-peer production, bricolage to viral propagation, the proposed study will provide an evidence-based evaluation of each practice through the impacts realized by the resulting works (Jacobson, 2010). From this assessment, the paper will prompt a re-imagining of socially-responsive design practice - one capable of addressing the immense challenges faced by those who have historically lived in the shadows of architectural practice, and works thereby created.

This research explores JazzSpace, a design methodology inspired by jazz improvisation and Afrofuturist principles, for centering cultural heritage in community design. JazzSpace integrates analog and digital processes through a symbiotic human-AI relationship, drawing on David Brown’s “structural improvisation” and William Wesley Taylor’s analysis of the jazz club as a site of “collective connection.” This study emphasizes established structures enabling creative exploration and community building through a call-and-response dynamic, mirroring jazz’s soloist-ensemble interplay.

Inspired by Sun Ra’s blending of composition and improvisation, JazzSpace fosters an iterative design process where human intuition and AI capabilities work in tandem, reflecting Taylor’s “theme, interrogation, and return” cycle of jazz performance. AI tools generate visualizations, while human designers provide cultural context, critical thinking, and artistic direction, balancing human-AI input. Folayemi Wilson’s 1970s Harlem experiences, influenced by Alice Coltrane and the National Black Theater, highlight Afrofuturism’s roots and its connection to spiritual jazz. These experiences, along with Wilson’s “Dark Matter” exhibition (2019) and Back Alley Jazz project (2018), demonstrate cultural memory’s power in community projects.

This research also examines jazz’s visual language through artists like Archibald Motley (whose “Gettin’ Religion” visually represents the jazz club), Norman Lewis, and Romare Bearden, whose collage inspired the JazzSpace Design Studio. This studio incorporated AI as a collaborative companion in a multi-phase design process where students translated responses to jazz playlists into architectural designs. This approach, resisting photorealistic renderings in professional practice, emphasizes drawing as a dynamic call and response. By training local language models and prioritizing community data ownership, JazzSpace challenges algorithmic biases. It aims for an AfroFuture-driven AI that empowers communities and aligns with Dr. Vernelle Noel's Situated Computations.

This paper delves into a recent interdisciplinary project-based workshop, The Movement Project, from a graduate-level special topics course. The semester-long project shared fundamentals across disciplines – from improvisational dance (body, movement) to cognitive science (mind), through private and University collaborators in an effort to advance architectural pedagogy, research and in turn, practice. Here, The Movement Projectworkshops borrow from dance when analyzing movement sequencing. This awareness of the body is seen in the concepts of “spatial intent” and “space harmony” found in Bartenieff and Laban theories. Just as breathe is fundamental to movement, this paper entry uncovers a case study for how interdisciplinary pedagogies fosters a more thorough understanding of the body and its relationship to space, which is fundamental to creating architecture. This idea refocuses us towards an interdisciplinary – and somatic – lens for how architecture could be taught, tested, and understood while expanding research on the intricate relationships between the body, movement, and perception.