Moozhan Shakeri is the founder of Seal on the Beach, an R&D company spun out of her Marie Curie Individual Fellowship on creativity and strategic thinking (SEMINAL). She has over a decade of experience developing decision support systems and games, and her work focuses on innovating geospatial tools for collective decision-making.
More than half of people admit not knowing how to take part in consultations about developments in their local area, that's from RTPI's recent research, The MIMBY Majority. From the National Community Development Projects in the 1960s to today's housing delivery efforts, planning has failed to solve the same problem: coordinating and communicating with the public. The theories keep changing (communicative planning, storytelling paradigm, smart cities), the tools keep multiplying, and yet the gap remains.
I am a planner shaped by the participatory planning era and a digital service designer driven by user-centred design. Both fields claim to put people at the centre, but they do it differently. From where I stand, those differences expose what planning gets wrong about participation.
The inclusion trap
For more than fifty years, planning's approach to public engagement has centred on one value: inclusion. Engage as many people as possible, balance power relations, give everyone a voice. RTPI's latest proposed framework[1] follows the same logic: early-stage wide participation for vision setting, targeted in-depth co-creation for objective setting and writing policy details. The goal at this early stage is to capture people's ambitions and hopes for the future of the area. The ideal output:
"Ideally thousands of vision ideas from across the community that have been analysed for consensus and sentiment to feed into a high level vision for the strategic authority area that residents have a sense of ownership over."
In service design, asking users "what do you want?" or "what is your vision?" is a failure mode. It means you have not done your job. The work of user research is not to collect visions and solutions, it is to uncover how people think, what they value unconsciously, where their unspoken needs lie. Good research reveals the problems users cannot articulate and the cause-and-effect relationships they assume but never state. The goal is not a consensus. It is understanding.
When users start designing the service themselves, demanding ownership, proposing features, it is a sign the designer has failed to understand them. Service designers do not create buy-in through consensus. They create it by demonstrating they have understood the user's needs and built solutions that work.
Service designers know that early-stage work is not about narrowing to consensus, it is about expanding possibilities. Finding unexpected connections, surfacing outlier perspectives, chasing insights that do not fit existing categories. The weirder the insight, the more potential it has to reveal something the system missed. But planning's consensus-driven process does the opposite: it filters out outliers, discards connections it cannot quantify, and ignores insights that fall outside its scope.
The cost of consensus
When your goal is consensus, you need structured input. Specific questions, workshops, feedback forms, interactive maps where users plot their preferences. This data is expensive to collect, hard to reuse, and impossible to re-analyse when new questions emerge. Every consultation becomes a bespoke exercise.
When your goal is understanding, you start differently. Service designers do not begin by collecting data, they begin by studying what already exists. People are already expressing themselves: they share their everyday life on social media, posting videos, leaving reviews, calling into local radio, writing blogs. The challenge is not getting people to participate. It is learning to listen to how they already do.
Planning's spatial barrier
The problem for planning has always been spatial data. Service designers can study shopping behaviour, social media activity, customer feedback, all tied to individual users. But planning needs to connect insights to place. Traditional tools either invade privacy (CCTV, mobile tracking) or are hard to be mapped (qualitative surveys). Hence planners default to asking people to manually pin their feedback to maps or to conduct intensive place-based studies.
This is where narrative analysis becomes crucial. People tell spatial stories all the time, they are just not in map format. They are dramatic, multimedia, unstructured: videos on social media, voice messages, blog posts, reviews. Someone posting about their favourite weekend walk can reveal what they value about public space. A complaint about a development shows what qualities matter to them. These aren't structured inputs, they're expressions of how people experience and imagine places.
At Seal on the Beach, we have taken a first step. We built Plotpoints, an API that extracts locations, behaviours, and sentiments from audio, video, and text stories. It lets planners understand users through natural expressions rather than structured consultations, connecting insights to places without forms or map interfaces, and contextualising qualitative data with socio-demographic information.
Conclusion: understanding first, engagement second
If planning shifts from consensus-seeking to understanding-seeking, the sequence changes entirely. Instead of expensive front-loaded consultations, planners could study existing expressions and behaviours, identify patterns and tensions, then enter engagement with hypotheses to test, not blank slates to fill. This does not replace participation, it makes it more meaningful. You engage people to refine your understanding, not to extract it from scratch.
[1] Miriam Levin, Hana Kapetanovic, and Aidan Garner, The MIMBY Majority: How to Unlock Housebuilding with Early and Representative Public Participation in Planning (Demos, May 2025), p.65.
