15:13 → [[MIT/Thesis/Dual/SDM]] two candidates →
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democratic partial orders

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how we can use co-design to create a participatory system of institutional decision-making

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potential structure

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Thesis: Participatory Decision-Making Using Co-Design and Partial Order

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Claim: Many complex system design problems involve stakeholders with divergent or incommensurable preferences; instead of aiming for total consensus, participatory processes can yield partially ordered sets of solutions that reflect trade-offs transparently and support informed co-evolution.

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Gap

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Most participatory frameworks focus on facilitation and dialogue, but lack formal structures for comparing competing preferences or compositions of solutions.

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Optimization frameworks assume total orders; real decisions often involve incomplete, evolving, or non-comparable preferences.

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Existing design processes rarely show participants the structured space of possibilities or how solutions emerge from trade-offs.

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Hypothesis

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Co-design processes can be formally modeled using partial orders (posets), revealing where preferences align, conflict, or compose.

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This model enables more transparent, explainable, and iterative participatory decision-making.

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Theoretical Foundations

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Category theory: posets as thin categories, functors as structured preference mappings

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Decision theory: partial orders, Pareto frontiers, multi-objective trade-off spaces

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Co-design (Zardini lab, Oikos, Urban Co-Design): participation as structured iteration, not consensus-seeking

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Ethics of participation: transparency and agency arise from structured intelligibility, not necessarily from agreement

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Method Overview

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Model co-design outcomes as elements in a partially ordered solution space

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Define functors that map stakeholder preference structures into solution-space rankings

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Use case study data from participatory workshops (e.g., Oikos, public space planning) to extract preference structures

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Build tooling or visualizations to show emerging posets of design options

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Analyze how changes in stakeholder framing affect the partial order over time

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Expected Contributions

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A formal framework for co-design as participatory ordering, not forced convergence

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Practical tools for participatory planning that reveal structure without reducing complexity

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A generalizable model of participatory reasoning as partial epistemic consensus

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