Co-design as participation: Creating meaningful pathways for collaboration in flood risk adaptation in Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo

Abstract

Considering the detrimental effects caused by wildfires in New Mexico, there is a pressing need for the development of innovative hazard adaptation and mitigation strategies. Community-based approaches in hazard response have the potential to harness the power of co-design and the incorporation of traditional knowledge to help make conventional research and design process considerably less extractive. In this paper, we explore the elements of community based, bottom-up approaches that can support successful outcomes, in contrast to centralized top-down approaches. By offering a critical perspective of the idea that projects defined as bottom-up are inherently more effective than those that are top-down, we aim to amend a common participatory design framework, the double-diamond design method, and present a community-engaged framework on flood risk adaptation with the co-design of an environmental data dashboard to address this gap. This can be mitigated by employing a more human-centered design approach as a baseline, and further amending it to center community. We employed a series of workshops in Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, in New Mexico, to integrate local knowledge. The goal of these workshops was to design an environmental data dashboard that would eventually serve as a point of information gathering and dissemination for the Pueblo. The workshops featured activities that worked to decolonize the process of co-design and put the Pueblo's needs at the center of the dashboard design process. The workshops allowed for participation in a variety of modalities – visual, verbal, auditory – giving community members space to lead and participate in many different formats.