LuisenBOT
A hybrid design-thinking process concept with a chatbot, to lower the threshold to participate in a public participation process.
Challenge
How can citizens be involved in a design thinking process to make a pedestrian underpass barrier-free and safe?
The challenge revolves around the redesign of the Luisentunnel. However, the core problem is to create a public participation process that is truly inclusive. Municipalities face the issue that often the same social group, and foremost the exact same people, always attend most of the public participation processes.
Team
Oskar Breitfeld, Chemie-Ingenieurwesen, TUM, Nina Lermer, Digital Engineering, HM, Katharina Kaun, Digital Engineering, HM, Duc Huy Nguyen, Politics & Technology, TUM
Contact: duc-huy.nguyen@tum.de
About the prototype
Our prototype is a hybrid public participation model that combines a digital AI chatbot with an inperson design thinking workshop to co-create solutions with citizens. The chatbot serves as the starting point, lowering access barriers and enabling broad participation by collecting, analyzing, and clustering input from diverse social groups. It identifies key concerns, needs, and ideas, which are then used to build a structured workshop. This data-driven foundation informs and prepares the subsequent analog workshop, where citizens and stakeholders engage in targeted co-creation and prototyping. The prototype was developed around the real-world use case of redesigning the Luisentunnel in Fürth but is fully scalable and adaptable to other cities and topics. By merging digital accessibility with human-centered methods, the prototype creates an inclusive, efficient, and replicable participation process that empowers communities and supports better urban decision-making.
Outputs
Project Report of Team Fürth 1
Impressions
