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Infrastructuring and the formation of publics in participatory design
Abstract
Of late, there has been a renewed and reinvigorated exchange of ideas across science and technology studies and participatory design, emerging from a shared interest in ‘publics’. In this article, we explore the role of participatory design in constituting publics, drawing together recent scholarship in both science and technology studies and participatory design. To frame our discussion, we present two case studies of community-based participatory design as empirical examples. From these examples and the literature, we discuss the ways in which the concepts of infrastructuring and attachments are central to the constitution of publics. Finally, through an analysis of our case studies, we consider the differences between the practices of enabling participation and infrastructuring, calling attention to the ways that constituting publics foregrounds an engagement with authority structures and unknown futures through the participatory design process.
... I aim to make sense of the entanglements of mutual mobilization, cooperation, and competition, and how CoHo manages these ambivalences to simultaneously make themselves invited yet maintain their subversive and alternative stance. I draw on sensitising concepts that highlight infrastructures and spaces that allow for cooperation without assuming consensus (Dagiral & Peerbaye, 2016;Guston, 2001;LeDantec & DiSalvo, 2013;Slota & Bowker, 2017). The notion of "infrastructuring" focuses on bottom-up practices for facilitating cooperation between different actors (Dagiral & Peerbaye, 2016;Farías, 2016) that goes along with the formation of publics and issues. ...
... For example, literature from critical migration studies (Kapsali, 2020; Wajsberg & Schapendonk, 2021) has analysed the informal and alternative infrastructuring activities of Social Inclusion • 2025 • Volume 13 • Article 7993 people on the move which complement, subvert, and challenge formal policies and dominant infrastructures for managing migration, while relating to the formal infrastructures in various ways. STS-inspired design studies (Bjögvinsson et al., 2012;LeDantec & DiSalvo, 2013) emphasise that engagement in designing urban spaces can contribute to "infrastructuring publics" by providing opportunities to meet and exchange knowledge and experiences from which common issues can form. To analyse how "cooperation without consensus" between different political, administrative, and professional actors can take place, Star and Griesemer (1989) introduce the concept of "boundary objects" (such as forms, standards, or concepts) that mediate between actors but hold different meanings for each of them. ...
... To make sense of this entanglement of mutual mobilization, cooperation, and competition, and how CoHo manages the ambivalences involved, in a third step I analysed CoHo's infrastructuring activities (Bjögvinsson et al., 2012;LeDantec & DiSalvo, 2013). Infrastructuring goes beyond ad-hoc strategies to allow for invitability, by creating more stable structures (Slota & Bowker, 2017) that grant CoHo eligibility to participate in urban planning and housing. ...
This contribution addresses how self‐managed collaborative housing (CoHo) groups engage in and with urban planning in Vienna and thereby how they manage the ambivalence of simultaneously getting involved in established planning and maintaining their alternative and subversive character. These groups aim to shape their own living environments and contribute to more sustainable, affordable, and collaborative housing and living. The relations and interactions between self‐managed housing projects and municipal planning actors are ambivalent and include both invited and uninvited forms of engagement. To be able to realise their projects and to intervene in urban planning, CoHo groups thus need to manage the boundary between making their aims compatible with and challenging urban planning visions and strategies. I analyse this by paying attention to how CoHo actors enact “invitability” while maintaining their resistance against certain urban policies. For doing so, I draw on and contribute to literature at the intersection of urban planning and STS that address public participation in collaborations and controversy contexts. The empirical materials stem from a multi‐sited ethnography, comprising interviews with members and proponents of CoHo groups, observations of public and semi‐public events of, with, and about CoHo, as well as documents and social media posts. I find that CoHo creates invitability by negotiating and working on three aspects that are directly or indirectly challenged by municipal and professional actors: their relevance, expertise, and reliability. They do so by engaging in infrastructuring activities that stabilise both the invitability and resistance of CoHo in Vienna.
... The concept of 'infra-structuring publics' has been proposed to capture what is distinctive about such initiatives. It proposes that we move from the noun ('infrastructure') to the verb ('infrastructuring'), and shift analytic attention away from infrastructures as accomplished objects towards the complex and consequential processes by which infrastructures are achieved, maintained, and adapted over time (Korn et al, 2019; see also Dantec andDiSalvo, 2013 andWahlberg, 2021). Infrastructural participation, then, is a profoundly ambivalent phenomenon: it is associated with the delegation by state and industry of the labour and cost of infrastructure maintenance to everyday publics, even as they transform these infrastructures into a source of profit for private entities. ...
... The concept of 'infra-structuring publics' has been proposed to capture what is distinctive about such initiatives. It proposes that we move from the noun ('infrastructure') to the verb ('infrastructuring'), and shift analytic attention away from infrastructures as accomplished objects towards the complex and consequential processes by which infrastructures are achieved, maintained, and adapted over time (Korn et al, 2019; see also Dantec andDiSalvo, 2013 andWahlberg, 2021). Infrastructural participation, then, is a profoundly ambivalent phenomenon: it is associated with the delegation by state and industry of the labour and cost of infrastructure maintenance to everyday publics, even as they transform these infrastructures into a source of profit for private entities. ...
User and citizen participation in the form of micro-actions scripted by digital systems has become indispensable to the functioning of government and society. In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘infrastructural participation’ to evaluate this phenomenon and investigate empirical instances of it in four topical areas: automated vehicles, digital education, citizen science and data protection. We formulate four societal challenges arising from infrastructural participation: 1) the resourcification of engagement, whereby digital participation becomes a mechanism for extracting people’s data, work and attention to serve as resources for value generation by industry and state, 2) growing infrastructural dependency of the public sector on the private sector, 3) the ‘infra-structuring’ of persons - i.e. asymmetric, interactive categorisation - by digital technology, and 4) knowledge deficits and power asymmetries. We also identify an alternative form of infrastructural participation that has potential to empower social actors and strengthen relations between innovation and society, namely ‘epistemic participation’ by non-experts in governance, innovation and research. To conclude, we call for the development of society-centric approaches to digital participation to address the above challenges and realise potential benefits.
... Specifically, Star and Ruhleder further elaborated the concept of infrastructure through eight characteristics [211]: 1) infrastructure is embedded into its environment; 2) infrastructure is transparent when at work; 3) infrastructure can reach beyond a single event or site; 4) new participants learn infrastructure through becoming a member of it; 5) infrastructure shapes and is shaped by conventions; 6) infrastructure is plugged into other infrastructures in a standardized manner; 7) infrastructure is built on installed bases; 8) infrastructure becomes visible upon breakdown. In the recent three decades, infrastructure has become an increasingly prevalent framework in various fields related to HCI, like Science, Technology and Society (STS) [48,230], Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) [111,164], Participatory Design (PD) [42,109,112,153], Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) [129,139], Information & Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) [157,192], and Accessible Computing [24,157,200]. On the one hand, scholars use infrastructure to comprehend large-scale and distributed systems in different contexts [10,26,27,75,79,83,180]. ...
... The studies presented in the findings, especially in the third theme, reveal that infrastructures can be problematic at the moment when they are conceptualized. According to STS researchers [48], the conceptualization of infrastructure is usually associated with the idea of public, where a set of facilities or services is open-access to everyone. But if the infrastructure cannot ensure the principle of being public, it can only become a gated residential area rather than a commonplace. ...
Infrastructure is an indispensable part of human life. Over the past decades, the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has paid increasing attention to human interactions with infrastructure. In this paper, we conducted a systematic literature review on infrastructure studies in SIGCHI, one of the most influential communities in HCI. We collected a total of 174 primary studies, covering works published between 2006 and 2023. Most of these studies are inspired by Susan Leigh Star's notion of infrastructure. We identify three major themes in infrastructure studies: growing infrastructure, appropriating infrastructure, and coping with infrastructure. Our review highlights a prevailing trend in SIGCHI's infrastructure research: a focus on informal infrastructural activities across various sociotechnical contexts. In particular, we examine studies that problematize infrastructure and alert the HCI community to its potentially harmful aspects.
... This is particularly relevant to the design of learning environments and activities about emerging technologies, where the goal is wide implementation in school classrooms [47,49]. Here, it is crucial to create PD processes that are community-centered, sustainable, replicable, scalable, and evolving [11,14,21,35], where relevant parties 1 are empowered to genuinely participate in design and decision-making processes [46]. Smith and Iversen [46] propose that this process involves attending to three dimensions of engagement in PD: scoping, developing, and scaling. ...
... These relationships also created a foundation of trust with teachers when they were invited to step into the role of being advised by teens. This was possible due existing infrastructures of collaboration with the STEM Stars and the teachers that could be leveraged to bring different communities together [11,14,35]. All of this reaffirms literature that argues that PD requires complex and long-term engagement and working across vertical levels of power [46]. ...
Research on children and youth's participation in different roles in the design of technologies is one of the core contributions in child-computer interaction studies. Building on this work, we situate youth as advisors to a group of high school computer science teacher- and researcher-designers creating learning activities in the context of emerging technologies. Specifically, we explore algorithm auditing as a potential entry point for youth and adults to critically evaluate generative AI algorithmic systems, with the goal of designing classroom lessons. Through a two-hour session where three teenagers (16-18 years) served as advisors, we (1) examine the types of expertise the teens shared and (2) identify back stage design elements that fostered their agency and voice in this advisory role. Our discussion considers opportunities and challenges in situating youth as advisors, providing recommendations for actions that researchers, facilitators, and teachers can take to make this unusual arrangement feasible and productive.
... Civic tech initiatives (Harrell, 2020;Schrock, 2019) often use the Internet of Things (IoT), online survey tools and others to engage citizens to collect data with the aim of improving community services, civic engagement/participation and citizens' quality of life. Such initiatives have made various contributions to generating open data (Dunn, 2016;Shibuya et al., 2022), community building (Cerratto Pargman et al., 2018;Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013) and outreach (Le Dantec et al., 2011;Wehn & Evers, 2014). Such 'civic data' -both captured and owned by the citizens for the citizens - Maskell et al., 2018;Shibuya et al., 2022) empower people with the knowledge and resources to take action on pressing local issues. ...
... Because the civic tech initiative and public sectors shared both a common concern and the objective of filling in the missing data for the cities, they collaborated to collect more data and disseminate the radiation information to communities. Similarly, the relationships of other civic tech initiatives with the public sector are collaborative in nature (Harrell, 2020;Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013;Shibuya et al., 2021). These examples prompt underexplored questions, such as how these civic data production initiatives contest and collaborate with previously underrepresented community members, such as noncitizens, indigenous populations and marginalised communities. ...
The Weizenbaum Institute organised its sixth Annual Conference on the topic of “Uncertain journeys into digital futures” in Berlin in June 2024. The conference focused on the challenge of the digital transformation and the socio-ecological transformation of society which are closely interlinked and crucial for prospering futures of humanity. Challenges include the protection of people, democratic institutions and the environment, as well as enabling participation in shaping changes and an inclusive and fair life. Relevant topics for addressing these challenges are smart cities and urban transformation, digital technologies for sustainability, social justice, governance and citizen participation as well as ideas and visions of the future.
... Este proceso es similar a la producción entre pares (peer to peer en inglés) en el sentido que se trata de un proceso colectivo que busca democratizar la innovación incluyendo a diversos actores y comunidades. Desde este enfoque se identifican, diseñan y sostienen infraestructuras sociales, técnicas y espaciales que pueden configurarse a futuro (Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013). ...
... Al ser colectivamente apropiados y adoptados, pueden ser modificados de diversas formas y por diversos actores. Como señalan Karasti y Baker (2004), Pipek y Wulf (2009) y Twidale y Floyd (2008) la infraestructuración es un proceso continuo que no debería estar enmarcado en una única fase del diseño (citados en Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013). La innovación, en estos procesos, proviene de acciones e interacciones de un público o un colectivo constituido alrededor del diseño participativo, que, en este caso, se trata de las comunidades de práctica orientadas a la fabricación digital. ...
Este artículo examina el desarrollo de la fabricación digital en Perú, centrándose en Lima Makers, el primer makerspace del país. A través de este caso, se exploran las dinámicas de socialización, identidad colaborativa y prácticas de innovación en un contexto donde la fabricación digital se cruza con la cultura artística y tecnológica local. Utilizando los conceptos de públicos recursivos, comunidades de práctica e infraestructuración, se analiza cómo Lima Makers cohesiona a sus miembros y fomenta la creatividad, aunque enfrenta desafíos para formar públicos recursivos activos en la gobernanza de la fabricación digital en el Perú. Además, se argumenta que esta dinámica local refleja un proceso de apropiación cultural y de creación de nuevas identidades tecnológicas en el sur global.
... However, we recognise that deliberation on rulesets for model outputs will not fundamentally alter the power dynamics between users, the public, and platforms. Second, we consider the "infrastructuring" [46] required to support and sustain more expansive feedback channels between the public and technology companies. We conclude by urging companies deploying LLMs to shift their focus from aligning model outputs with user preferences to fostering sustained dialogue with diverse 'publics' about the purposes and applications of these technologies. ...
... We echo Wang et al. [76] in urging companies to focus on the participation of groups or institutions representing populations likely to be significantly impacted by a given LLM. Infrastructuring such participation requires deep engagement with the methodological tools of Participatory Design (PD), which has a long-standing practice of critical thinking about how to form and sustain 'publics' to address participants' concerns over time [24,46]. When implemented effectively, PD prioritises future issues concerning participants rather than solely focusing on the immediate concerns of designers or researchers. ...
Large language models (LLMs) are now accessible to anyone with a computer, a web browser, and an internet connection via browser-based interfaces, shifting the dynamics of participation in AI development. This paper examines the affordances of interactive feedback features in ChatGPT's interface, analysing how they shape user input and participation in LLM iteration. Drawing on a survey of ChatGPT users and applying the mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances, we demonstrate that these features encourage simple, frequent, and performance-focused feedback while discouraging collective input and discussions among users. We argue that this feedback format significantly constrains user participation, reinforcing power imbalances between users, the public, and companies developing LLMs. Our analysis contributes to the growing body of literature on participatory AI by critically examining the limitations of existing feedback processes and proposing directions for their redesign. To enable more meaningful public participation in AI development, we advocate for a shift away from processes focused on aligning model outputs with specific user preferences. Instead, we emphasise the need for processes that facilitate dialogue between companies and diverse 'publics' about the purpose and applications of LLMs. This approach requires attention to the ongoing work of infrastructuring - creating and sustaining the social, technical, and institutional structures necessary to address matters of concern to groups impacted by AI development and deployment.
... While Devon and Van de Poel (2004) discuss design ethics in the context of engineering design, participatory design calls for a different or additional set of normative considerations. Participatory design involves a higher degree of interdisciplinarity, a consideration of more diverse worldviews, and a more direct and intensive engagement between designers and publics (Björgvinsson et al., 2010;Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013). A normative principle that motivates participatory design is that those affected by a design should have a say in it. ...
... For example, while the municipality is a key stakeholder in our project, the smart energy platform development became entangled with various other municipal programs, such as the renovation of homes and area development initiatives. To ensure structural impact, our design work would require intervention within this institutional environment -i.e., a form of infrastructuring or institutioning (Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013;Matthews et al., 2022). During the co-creation sessions with locals, a key recurring theme concerned relations with the municipality and discussions of relevant regulatory frameworks. ...
... (for examples see Karasti, 2014;Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013;Macchia et al., 2015;Seravalli, 2012). Therefore, by actively addressing the role politics and knowledge play in determining what gets designed, PD made significant advances in the democratization of the design process. ...
... Infrastructuring represents a way to build longterm relationships with participants. The practice asserts that through careful engagement, and the making of time and space for democratic dialogues, designers can support the agency of community-led initiatives as a source of innovation (Hansson et al., 2018;Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013). From another perspective, Liesbeth Huybrechts and colleagues highlight the need for designers to engage with institutions as part of the process of changing their relations and transforming the institutions themselves. ...
Download also available at Carnegie Mellon University's repository: https://kilthub.cmu.edu/articles/thesis/Becoming_Resonant_in_Design/23422235/1
The latest developments in design theory especially in the areas of Participatory Design, Transition Design, Design for Social Innovation, and Pluriversal Designs call for designing that is localized, relational, and takes the sustainment and healing of the web of life as a matter of care. Yet, current expressions of design theory in practice expose missing threads between concepts and lived experience, particularly in nuanced understandings of ways-of-being as designers entangled in socioecological work.
Situated in the desert city of Hermosillo, Mexico, this practice-based inquiry aims at weaving new threads between design practice and theory to cultivate attunement for specificities in our designing. This Global South context—located in the borderlands between Mexico and the USA—is undergoing a 150 year-long pursuit of modernity aimed at endless economic growth, competitiveness, and accumulation of capital. Powered by logics of extraction, design has reproduced the goals of modernity, resulting in the exclusion of women and plants from public spaces and detonating socioecological degradation. Attuning to the context of women and plants in Hermosillo, I refocus my design praxis to center women-plant relations and the setting of conditions for creative autonomy i.e., people’s capacities to change their own ways of living. To do so, I developed a methodological approach I call convivial making. Convivial making imbues logics of conviviality, embodied and affective reasoning, and time-space situatedness and rhythms. Using convivial making in Hermosillo, I incorporated embroidery practices, in which as women, we formed embroidery circles and occupied the public space with plants; we reflected narratively on our past and present relations with plants and the desert and contemplated our future relations with plants in the city.
As a result, women-plant relations expose tensions in Hermosillo-Sonoran desert dynamics. Much of these tensions are consequences of the city’s pursuit of modernity. In contrast, amidst exclusion, women-plant relations bear seeds of resilient hope. Those seeds of resilient hope are experiences that may include hope, but also fear, rage, grief, solace, and healing. As such they manifest, and make as we go, non-exclusionary ways-of-being in the city and the territory.
Therefore, I call for a new way-of-being as a designer, one that cultivates design sensibilities that attune and correspond with forms of worldmaking like the ones found in women-plant relations in Hermosillo. For this new way-of-being as a designer, I propose a design philosophy I characterize as resonant, as it involves a back-and-forth between intentionality and attentionality from the designer. In this resonant design philosophy, I bring to the fore three design sensibilities: sensing conditions for healing and living; sensing relations for mutual dependability; and sensing situated materials for conviviality. Thus, the resonant design philosophy positions the design endeavor in a paradigm of caring for relations through designing for conditions of creative autonomy. As part of it, this resonant design philosophy invites designers to engage in caring for our designing.
... On the other hand, algorithmic tools have been used to 'predict' where crime might happen [13,32], automate the allocation of government benefits [5], detect the location of suspected gunfire [22], automate ticketing for traffic violations [23], and 'modernize' workingclass urban centers [18] -initiatives that perpetuate systemic inequalities and processes of minoritization along lines of race, class, and more [2,10,29]. These public sector systems are developed or acquired using public resources to serve the public's interest [7]. Therefore, it is crucial to employ participatory design (PD) methods to ensure that AI systems align with the unique needs and values of the communities they serve. ...
Local and federal agencies are rapidly adopting AI systems to augment or automate critical decisions, efficiently use resources, and improve public service delivery. AI systems are being used to support tasks associated with urban planning, security, surveillance, energy and critical infrastructure, and support decisions that directly affect citizens and their ability to access essential services. Local governments act as the governance tier closest to citizens and must play a critical role in upholding democratic values and building community trust especially as it relates to smart city initiatives that seek to transform public services through the adoption of AI. Community-centered and participatory approaches have been central for ensuring the appropriate adoption of technology; however, AI innovation introduces new challenges in this context because participatory AI design methods require more robust formulation and face higher standards for implementation in the public sector compared to the private sector. This requires us to reassess traditional methods used in this space as well as develop new resources and methods. This workshop will explore emerging practices in participatory algorithm design - or the use of public participation and community engagement - in the scoping, design, adoption, and implementation of public sector algorithms.
... Our analysis of public participation in urban commoning was inspired by scholarship in science and technology studies on infrastructures and infrastructural work (Bowker & Star, 2000;Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013;Star & Ruhleder, 1996) and a discussion about relations between infrastructures and public participation (Baringhorst et al., 2019). ...
Despite a strong participatory discourse on the healthy city movement, researchers and activists indicate that low‐income groups and city areas often are excluded from participatory urban development and do not benefit from healthy city policies. To better understand the challenges that citizens who promote a healthy urban environment in low‐income areas face, we analyzed the infrastructural work of a citizens’ initiative. We focused on their building of a socio‐material infrastructure in an empty park surrounded by neighborhoods the municipality and other organizations classified as problematic in multiple ways. The infrastructural work consisted of experiments to attract new publics; regular work to revive a neglected garden; and negotiations with the municipality about new trees, natural play elements, and other additions to the park. However, residents’ work was thwarted by institutional control over the neighborhood public and by unreliable bureaucratic interactions that resulted in endless waiting, adaptations, and failures. In this setting, citizens adjusted their infrastructural work by establishing new alliances and engaging in “garden diplomacy” to maintain constructive relationships and a hopeful perspective. The work citizens do to make new local publics should be acknowledged. Moreover, institutional obduracy and bureaucratic ambiguities form a hostile environment for citizen participation. We characterize this hostile environment as shaped by a “residual realism” that reproduces problem neighborhoods. We end with our contribution to a co‐constructionist approach to public participation.
... Rather than viewing this value differentiation as a barrier, they advocate embracing it as an opportunity to develop a successful set of interventions to address wicked problems. Dantec & DiSalvo (2013) introduce the concepts of infrastructure and attachments in participatory design as crucial elements in forming "publics" (Dewey, 1954) around critical social issues. These strategies are essential for responding to the inevitable challenges that arise from interactions with socio-material things, offering a platform for collective expression and action. ...
This contribution examines the application of Service Design within the public sector, drawing on the challenges posed by the so-called wicked problems to understand its potential and limitations. By critically reflecting on the unique constraints and complexities of government services and the differences with their commercial counterparts, the scope is to identify possible trajectories for future research and practice. While Service Design integrates multiple perspectives and works at different scales, responding to external and internal disturbances, it requires a comprehensive knowledge base that considers wicked problems’ properties such as demos, fragility and antifragility, degree of wickedness, public formation, plurality of values and approaches to Service Design for the public sector. Recognising these limitations and opportunities, the contribution invites a more nuanced understanding of Service Design in the public sector to decipher and address societal challenges.
... The concept of public formation is relevant for its generative role in the creation of publics (Le . Rooted in the idea of infrastructuring, public formation in DT involves identifying and shaping social and material interdependencies among community members, thereby forming a cohesive public Dantec and DiSalvo 2013). This process facilitates the identification of needs and framing of problems, supports the definition of potential future consequences, and encourages the negotiation of multiple perspectives. ...
This chapter examines the application of design thinking in enhancing e-participation by aligning DT practices with identified barriers to participation. The chapter discusses practical strategies for leveraging DT to address issues such as digital illiteracy and lack of engagement, providing a framework for implementing more effective and inclusive e-participation initiatives.
... We discerned in the local debates that paused many initiatives -not just our project -a manifestation of democratic agonism in political life. Framing our activities as a design experiment in civics (DiSalvo 2022) supported our reflection on those that had apparently 'failed', which still enhanced our understanding of the conditions needed to enable a long-term change and contribute to creating "connections to enable future actions" (DiSalvo 2022, 121), i.e. infrastructuring (Hillgren et al. 2011;Le Dantec and DiSalvo 2013;Star and Ruhleder 1996;Van Reusel 2016), and knowledge to navigate a structured institutional landscape, i.e. institutioning (Huybrechts et al. 2017, 158). In practice, we realised that we needed to slow down our project goals and schedule to spark a further re-articulation of contextual voices, making sticking to our pre-determined plan secondary to developing a deeper connection with the local community through meetings and conversations. ...
Within the conceptual framework of design for social innovation and democracy, this paper reports on implementing participatory processes in regenerating public spaces in semi-rural contexts, questioning the meaning of transformative innovation, servitisation, and agonism in non-urban contexts. This inquiry argues for exploring a reassessment of how we enact participatory public space regeneration strategies through their application in a remote context. The latter has been untouched by all the bottom-up initiatives and movements that have swept through European urban centres over the last fifteen years; returning to the urban space with these reflections could provide an opportunity to explore new perspectives, even in a saturated context, questioning the models of metropolitan practices. By challenging the paradigm of innovation as the only direction associated with a valid process of improvement and change, this paper delves into the urgency of looking at co-design processes through the lenses of decoloniality, relationality and agonism, creating moments of reflexivity inside the research team and with the local community. Our reflections and learnings stem from “Human Cities / SMOTIES, Creative Works with Small and Remote Places”, a participatory design project that examines community engagement methods for co-designing public spaces and transformations in European rural areas, specifically Albugnano, a small town in northern Italy. Setting the Albugnano community as an experimental ground, the case study addresses the lack of valorisation of tangible and intangible heritage, depopulation and social fragmentation by unpacking narratives, nurturing social imagination, and collectively envisioning and designing potential regenerative transformations.
... Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research DOI: 10.16993/sjdr.1138 To expound on the process, it's insightful to draw from the distinction made by Di Salvo and Le Dantec (2013) between 'design for use' and 'design for future use.' These authors explain how in participatory spaces there are two different ways to articulate participation. ...
... Participatory design should be implemented through a collective task of caring and taking action for our future [26,39], considering institutional constraints as a resource for new strategies [82]. However, to do so, designers must deal with the challenge of the existing asymmetries between them and the public [37,55], how publics are constructed (i.e., who and how participate) [35,38], and how objects can have a material agency and influence on the process [65]. Many methods and tools described above can be conceptualized as boundary objects, which could bridge asymmetries between designers and stakeholders [77,78]. ...
Designing public spaces requires balancing the interests of diverse stakeholders within a constrained physical and institutional space. Designers usually approach these problems through participatory methods but struggle to incorporate diverse perspectives into design outputs. The growing capabilities of image-generative artificial intelligence (IGAI) could support participatory design. Prior work in leveraging IGAI's capabilities in design has focused on augmenting the experience and performance of individual creators. We study how IGAI could facilitate participatory processes when designing public spaces, a complex collaborative task. We conducted workshops and IGAI-mediated interviews in a real-world participatory process to upgrade a park in Los Angeles. We found (1) a shift from focusing on accuracy to fostering richer conversations as the desirable outcome of adopting IGAI in participatory design, (2) that IGAI promoted more space-aware conversations, and (3) that IGAI-mediated conversations are subject to the abilities of the facilitators in managing the interaction between themselves, the AI, and stakeholders. We contribute by discussing practical implications for using IGAI in participatory design, including success metrics, relevant skills, and asymmetries between designers and stakeholders. We finish by proposing a series of open research questions.
... As we know PD's co-creation can often reveal different needs, views, values, expectations, and understandings among the stakeholders. These can become problematic when there is coarse resolution of their respective purposes and awareness [13]. Kibi and colleagues have discovered that a shared common purpose can become a unifying force to align divergent perspectives and clarify a firmer direction for stakeholders. ...
... Moreover, Dantec and DiSalvo [8] explore the concept of 'infrastructuring', which significantly enriches our understanding of how publics form and engage within participatory design frameworks. These scholars argue that participatory design not only requires project-specific engagements but also involves the ongoing development of infrastructures that support sustained participation and dialogue. ...
Every design initiative begins with intention, and participatory design is no exception. Regrettably, prevailing discourse surrounding design intentions predominantly privileges the perspective of the researcher or designer, thus marginalising the design intentions articulated by local communities. Drawing from a participatory design research workshop focused on local health conducted within an Indigenous Dayak community in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, this paper critically examines the concept of niat (intention). It explores the participatory research process and the underlying intentions that guide it. Additionally, this paper presents argumentative reflections advocating for the recognition of local voices in participatory design as manifestations of localised design intentions. By prioritising the articulations of the community or participants, this approach facilitates a shift away from the exclusive consideration of intentions held by designers or researchers.
... From one perspective, this could be framed as a purely technical problem, and approach it similarly to research on ontology alignment and integration. But given the deeply sociotechnical nature of negotiation and alignment that constitutes standards development [34], HCI research might make important contributions by drawing on existing design patterns for supporting collective deliberation [57] and infrastructuring [63,82]. ...
Sharing, reusing, and synthesizing knowledge is central to the research process, both individually, and with others. These core functions are not supported by our formal scholarly publishing infrastructure: instead of the smooth functioning of functional infrastructure, researchers resort to laborious "hacks" and workarounds to "mine" publications for what they need, and struggle to efficiently share the resulting information with others. Information scientists have proposed an alternative infrastructure based on the more appropriately granular model of a discourse graph of claims, and evidence, along with key rhetorical relationships between them. However, despite significant technical progress on standards and platforms, the predominant infrastructure remains steadfastly document-based. Drawing from infrastructure studies, we locate the current infrastructural bottlenecks in the lack of local systems that integrate discourse-centric models to augment synthesis work, from which an infrastructure for synthesis can be grown. Through 3 years of research through design and field deployment in a distributed community of hypertext notebook users, we elaborate a design vision of what can and should be built in order to grow a discourse-centric synthesis infrastructure: a thriving "installed base" of researchers authoring local, shareable discourse graphs to improve synthesis work, enhance primary research and research training, and augment collaborative research. We discuss how this design vision -- and our empirical work -- contributes steps towards a new infrastructure for synthesis, and increases HCI's capacity to advance collective intelligence and solve infrastructure-level problems.
... This means that the structure is open to support the possibilities that emerge (Hillgren et al., 2011). The designers then provide user communities with socio-technical resources to deal with "matters of concern" (Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013). One prominent example is the work of Pelle Ehn and colleagues in the Medea Lab, which promoted grassroots initiatives in a multiethnic, lower-income neighborhood in Malmo, Sweden. ...
To address the climate crisis, radical lifestyle changes are needed. This dissertation presents an approach for design-driven, or 'designerly' living labs, to explore and demonstrate possible sustainable concepts and futures in the context of people's everyday lives. By living the change, these designerly labs have provided rich insights into the entangled social-technical nature of sustainable futures, and identified barriers and pathways towards them.
The dissertation is based on detailed and operative accounts of seven such designerly living labs carried out by design researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden from 2014 to 2023. A cross-case analysis is presented in order to identify and validate the key characteristics of this emerging approach, and how they connect to design practice.
... In similar ways, the housing activists' online communication can be characterised as infrastructural [cf. Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013] -they do not only participate in the 'social conversation about science', but also participate in building the spaces and arenas in which this conversation takes place. In this way, they secure themselves a place at the table by providing the table, and by doing so they gain a certain influence in shaping which voices are amplified, which problem framings are strengthened, and which issues are created. ...
Based on an understanding of science communication as `social conversation about science', in this paper we explore how technoscientific knowledge is communicated through housing activists' use of online media. We analyse collaborative housing groups in Vienna and find that their online communication practices are contextual and reflexive: technoscientific knowledges are always contextualised through the activists' political issues, while the activists constantly reflect on and negotiate their means and style of communication. The case both offers insights into the diverse ways and sites in which public sense-making about science takes place, and inspiration for other forms of science communication.
... Infrastructuring recognizes that effective participation requires more than just inviting people to workshops or design sessions. It involves creating the conditions and structures that enable meaningful and sustained collaboration throughout the entire design process and ideally beyond (Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013). ...
Co-design has been widely applied to develop interventions supporting behavior change. While numerous co-design propositions have been developed, applying these in practice often leads to difficulties and tensions. This study aims to review the co-design propositions and understand the dilemmas when applying them. A literature review was conducted, and twelve co-design propositions were identified after qualitative analysis. The study found that some co-design propositions conflict because they align with an idealistic versus a realistic perspective. By studying these conflicts in-depth, seven dilemmas were identified at the intersection of realist and idealist propositions. Implications of the findings on design for behavior change were discussed, and this paper serves as a starting point to help researchers and practitioners identify, articulate, and navigate these dilemmas to achieve successful code sign outcomes.
Living Lab (LL) is a design approach to create technologies and/or services through long-term citizens involvement and experiments in real-life environments. LL has the “openness” of the design process, since citizens are involved as “design partners” in its process. LL has been attracting much attention globally in recent years; projects in various fields, for example, urban design, healthcare, and ICT, are being actively implemented in various cities and regions. However, the theorization and systematization of knowledge on LL have not been sufficiently carried out. In fact, research on LL is often presented dispersedly in conferences and journals in various fields; this situation makes it very difficult to grasp the latest trends and overview of LL research arena. In this study, we first summarize the concept of LL. We then conduct a literature survey on LL research published in the last five years to clarify the latest trends in LL research. Based on the results of the literature survey, we present a concept of “building an infrastructure to support LL practices” as a future direction of LL research, and discuss some specific research themes.
The complexity of social and ecological crises and the need for collective action to tackle them brought forth collective inquiry as an essential capacity for societies to combine their knowledge and creativity, navigate complexity, and respond with adaptive solutions. However, current approaches to sensemaking often remain anchored in the same mindsets and worldviews that underpin these crises, constraining their ability to account for the fundamental shifts needed.
This research addresses this gap by exploring how collective inquiry, when framed as a narrative practice, can open space for alternative perspectives and pathways in systems transformation. This study positions narratives as dynamic meaning systems that shape how groups interpret issues, determine relevance, and envision new possibilities. The dissertation is structured as three studies, situated in the context of food systems, each exploring ways to engage and mobilize these meaning systems across different contexts and scales of collective inquiry.
A central contribution of this research is the framework of narrative infrastructures—the social and material contexts through which narratives of change are constructed, circulated, and sustained within systems change efforts. This framework supports designers in navigating and shaping the spaces where narratives are articulated, contested, and maintained, to foster more critical, pluralistic, and transformative approaches to collective inquiry. Ultimately, this work enhances design’s capacity to foster the shifts in mindsets through which societies envision their collective futures, using its narrative agency to disrupt harmful paradigms and open space for radical possibilities in the making.
This paper explores how systems informed collaborative design practice can help multi-discipline, multi-stake-holder research to integrate knowledge and think in aligned ways. Whilst there is growing appreciation for the need to do joined-up complex research and move beyond one-way research processes, there is less consensus on how researchers can practically work together to integrate their skills, expertise, and knowledge. Through working closely with an ongoing research consortium, participatory design approaches were developed that can benefit complex research projects, leading towards better collaboration across disciplines sectors and publics. Learning from interviews with researchers on a large-scale multi-discipline multi-sector consortium, who came from different backgrounds, with varying perspectives and expectations, collaborative design methods were developed to support researchers in taking self-determined steps toward more productive research in-frastructures. The consortium aimed to employ systems approaches to help researchers to understand and address complex urban challenges. Taking a starting point in different understandings of systems approaches on the project, the design research was influenced by contemporary approaches to community involvement in the urban planning system. The activities described in this paper sought to build capacity towards a responsive infrastructure of shared connections, interests, and needs, with the overarching aims of supporting future discussions about dynamics, interactions, alignments, and synergies; and making a process contribution to the improved integration of the consortium.
This work explores the role of design in supporting public administrations to set up local-based NetZero city strategies. In particular the paper presents the design-led participatory process designed and led by the Service Design Lab team (authors) to support the Municipality of Prato in preparing the baseline for the Climate City Contract. Based on four pillars (energy efficiency, sustainable mobility, circular economy, agriculture and land use, urban forestry), the process aimed at spotting systemic barriers and laying the groundwork to co-design a portfolio of actions aimed at achieving carbon neutrality by the year 2030. The strategy supporting the process was based on two main phases (understanding the system and co-designing a portfolio) connected by an intermediary bridging phase, and another cross-cutting level of inquiry itself consisting of two stages: the front-end (the local-based facilitation process) and the back-end (the systemic interconnectedness process). Lastly we highlight the limitations of the process and the key takeaways of participatory infrastructuring actions, and specifically the benefits for the Municipality in establishing meaningful and context-based impact pathways.
This chapter delves into the theoretical foundations of Design Thinking (DT) for public sector innovation, highlighting its capacity to impact organisational culture, strategic innovation, and operational processes. Emphasising a user-centric approach, the chapter explores how DT principles like abductive reasoning, prototyping, and co-design can transform public services by aligning them more closely with user needs and expectations.
Миграционные процессы, особенно среди молодежи в период реализации образовательных стратегий, лишают малые и средние города важных трудовых ресурсов и снижают перспективы развития городов и регионов. Именно поэтому формирование и анализ территориальной идентичности как важного фактора закрепления населения в родном регионе является одной из актуальных задач. Автор статьи выделяет в более общем концепте территориальной идентичности два ключевых понятия: идентичность территории и территориальную идентичность населения. Основной целью данной статьи и новизной исследования является создание и адаптация методики по измерению уровня территориальной идентичности населения, под которой понимается привязанность, вовлеченность в дела региона, желание оставаться жить и работать на данной территории. В статье приведен детальный алгоритм применения методики, базовые индикаторные вопросы, а также принцип расчета общего индекса территориальной идентичности каждого респондента и дифференциацию всего населения по уровню территориальной идентичности. Приводятся результаты её апробации на основании опроса жителей г. Череповца. Практическая значимость данной методики заключается в возможности её использования для сравнения территориальной идентичности населения разных регионов, дифференциации респондентов на разные по уровню территориальной идентичности группы. Применение индексного метода и разделение всего населения на группы даёт возможности использования таких статистических методов для изучения взаимосвязи данного феномена с другими переменными, как дисперсионный и корреляционный виды анализа, что автор демонстрирует для подтверждения взаимосвязи уровня территориальной идентичности населения и оценок политической и экономической ситуации жителей города.
Recently, there has been a growing attention in the HCI community on leveraging biological affordances of living organisms to expand interaction possibilities. Current interests range from the development of grown materials for interactive products to the design of bio-digital systems. To facilitate such work, biological practices are no longer only undertaken in professional laboratories, but also increasingly in fabrication settings. In this paper, we aim to provide an understanding of considerations and strategies that could inform future infrastructural designs for working with living organisms. Our insights are drawn from site visits and interviews in Western European locations currently exploring this domain. Building on our findings, we argue that the infrastructural designs of these spaces are not defined by discrete material entities, but instead, point towards conditions which are cultivated differently in each context.
Decentralised social media platforms are increasingly being recognised as viable alternatives to their centralised counterparts. Among these, Mastodon stands out as a popular alternative, offering a citizen-powered option distinct from larger and centralised platforms like Twitter/X. However, the future path of Mastodon remains uncertain, particularly in terms of its challenges and the long-term viability of a more citizen-powered internet. In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities, to understand their motivations and lived experiences of running decentralised social media. Our research indicates that while decentralised social media offers significant potential in supporting the safety, identity and privacy needs of marginalised and stigmatised communities, they also face considerable challenges in content moderation, community building and governance. We emphasise the importance of considering the community's values and diversity when designing future support mechanisms.
The proliferation of food delivery platforms is profoundly changing the way urbanites eat, work, and move. These platforms increasingly mobilise urban resources and population to function as critical infrastructure in the field of logistics and transportation, giving rise to a new form of governance. This paper traces the infrastructuralisation of Baemin, the largest South Korean food delivery platform. By engaging with critical infrastructure studies, it seeks to make the infrastructuring work of platforms more visible and political, revealing an opening for progressive disruption. Drawing on the empirical data from a mobile ethnography in Seoul, the paper claims that Baemin operationalises distinct sociotechnical arrangements that infrastructurally integrate the labour of couriers in its automated operations and generate ceaseless urban flows. Furthermore, it brings to the fore the significance of couriers' embodied practices in enabling and sustaining the contingent, hence precarious, operation of the convenient platform-mediated food delivery that many take for granted.
Fourth order design, which involves systems and environments, is a frequently misunderstood area of design. The concept of institution offers a way to clarify and enrich fourth order design in both theory and practice. Building on the idea that institutions are active sites of organizational change, this article argues that institutions are objects of design. Specifically, it is an inquiry into the role of institutions and how they provide a sense of durable form and unity, which is sorely missing in our contemporary lives. Using the different modes of thought first pioneered by the philosopher Richard McKeon and imaginatively applied in design by Richard Buchanan, this article introduces a pluralistic framework of institutions to better understand-and, more importantly, shape and reshape-organizations. Furthermore, it emphasizes the need for designers to embrace the humility that often accompanies a deep appreciation of institutions as unconventional creations of human making. As complex products that also can take on a life of their own, institutions challenge our inherited understanding of the design process and the role of designers. As formative systems, institutions are re-formable objects that have the power to form designers and design practices anew. Keywords institutioning institutions human systems design fourth order design philosophy of design diffusions of innovation
An emerging area of research on automated futures is that of digital equity—how to innovate and develop digital products, services, and experiences which promote equality of access, and align with the lived experiences of communities they are expected to benefit. In this chapter, we outline a research project focused on the adoption of digital fabrication technologies by a rural community in Bridport, United Kingdom. Their challenge is that of housing futures not only in terms of stock demand, but more broadly in terms of sustainable forms of housing construction (i.e., modern methods of construction) using local materials and skills. The chapter navigates a complex set of interrelations between issues of land and place, skills, material flows, and technologies. After expectations are unmet by government top-down growth and industrial strategies, we frame collective design practices of prototyping and making as a way to exchange, prompt, and visualise housing futures through our Living Lab in Denhay Farm—a space for testing out housing building elements, material opportunities, and early local material supply chains. Through a place-based approach contextualised by marginalised rural and coastal communities, we reflect and introduce expressions of technology adoption and co-production as vehicles to potentially address specific problems of housing procurement and construction, and more broadly as mechanisms to facilitate inclusion, access, knowledge mobilisation, and research impact.
In an era of digital governance, the use of automation for individual and cooperative work is increasing in public administrations (Tangi et al., 2022). Despite the promises of efficiency and cost reduction, automation could bring new challenges to the governance schemes. Regional, national, and local governments are taking measures to regulate and measure the impact of automated decision-making systems (ADMS). This research focuses on the use and adoption of ADMS in European public administrations to understand how these systems have been transforming the roles, tasks, and duties of street-level bureaucrats. We conducted a qualitative study in which we interviewed street-level bureaucrats from three administrations who had used an ADMS for several years, which was embedded in their daily work routines. The outcome of our research is an analysis of five dimensions of how collaborative work, the organizational settings, the capacities of bureaucrats and the implementation of the ADMS enable or limit the capacities for offering better services towards the citizens.
The article explores the concept of coexistence in public space, drawing parallels between urban environments and the ecosystems they inhabit, between the actions and tools that foster encounter and sharing. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this conceptual shift, emphasising public spaces as collective and shared domains crucial for social interaction, community building and democracy. Public spaces are seen as palimpsests, subject to constant rewriting and reorganisation, serving as reservoirs of cultural identity and social affiliation. The use of public space to undertake community-led neighbourhood actions can transform local neighbourhood services into open entities that directly involve the communities of place, increasingly fostering an environment of coexistence. The article explores the role of public participation as a tool of participatory democracy, emphasising the power of citizens to transform common interests into action. Through participatory processes, communities transform local neighbourhood services, fostering physical and relational proximity and creating design communities. Participatory processes in public space are explored as mechanisms to foster coexistence, with attention to the actors involved and the need to consider the socio-political and socio-economic dimensions of the context. This scenario emphasises the importance of designing spaces beyond mere accessibility to promote meaningful interactions and shared ownership, fostering a sense of belonging and shared responsibility within communities.
Issues concerning technological risk have increasingly become the subject of deliberative exercises involving participation of ordinary citizens. The most popular topic for deliberation has been genetically modified (GM) foods. Despite the varied circumstances of their establishment, deliberative "minipublics" almost always produce recommendations that reflect a worldview more "precautionary" than the "Promethean" outlook more common among governing elites. There are good structural reasons for this difference. Its existence raises the question of why elites sponsor mini-publics and if policy is little affected by the results of deliberations, questions the possibility of deliberative legitimation of public policy. We make this argument by looking at mini-publics (where possible, a common consensus conference design) on GM foods in France, the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and Switzerland. Deliberative legitimation becomes plausible if elites can attenuate their Promethean outlook. This is possible if ecological modernization discourse pervades their politics; Denmark provides an illustration.
Over the last decade, the major firms and cultural institutions that have dominated media and information industries in the U.S. and globally have been challenged by people adopting new technologies to intervene and participate in mainstream media culture. In this paper key genres and features of oppositional and activist new media are described and cases are presented, and their implications for participatory design are briefly outlined.
As technology becomes more embedded in our daily lives, there is a great deal of hope about the use of information technology to achieve positive community outcomes like increasing access to local information, promoting civic engagement, and creating avenues for collaboration and communication. While these technologies provide opportunities for community groups to achieve their own goals, most community computing studies describe community members in fairly passive ways as users of existing systems rather than as meaningful contributors to the design process. The Civic Nexus project is a three year participatory design project that involves working with community groups to increase their capacity to solve local community problems through the use of leading edge computing tools. Our view of participatory design is one in which community members take control of the design process in terms of both directing what should be done and maintaining the technology infrastructure. In this paper, we describe our process of participatory design with three community groups and present associated challenges for designers engaging in participatory design in community computing contexts.
Participatory design has become increasingly engaged in public spheres and everyday life and is no longer solely concerned with the workplace. This is not only a shift from work oriented productive activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements, but also a new milieu for production and innovation and entails a reorientation from "democracy at work" to "democratic innovation". What democratic innovation entails is currently defined by management and innovation research, which claims that innovation has been democratized through easy access to production tools and lead-users as the new experts driving innovation. We sketch an alternative "democratizing innovation" practice more in line with the original visions of participatory design based on our experience of running Malmö Living Labs - an open innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and ideas evolve from bottom-up long-term collaborations amongst diverse stakeholders. Two cases and controversial matters of concern are discussed. The fruitfulness of the concepts "Things" (as opposed to objects), "infrastructuring" (as opposed to projects) and "agonistic public spaces" (as opposed to consensual decision-making) are explored in relation to participatory innovation practices and democracy.
Shapiro (38) recently argued that participatory design practitioners should consider pursuing a reformist agenda through engagement with the procurement and development of systems in the public sector. This paper considers the challenges, contradictions and possible arenas for success in the context of a reformist participatory design agenda (38), by reflecting on recent work undertaken from a stance similar to that advocated by Shapiro (38) in a public sector agency. The intention of the paper is to stimulate and extend discussion about arenas in which the political goals that characterized participatory design in its early days can be pursued, and extend discussions about the role of politics in contemporary participatory design (14).
This paper describes and analyses the early developmental stages of a community learning network based in an urban community and social service agency. With government funding, the community organization contracted with a small software firm to design and implement participatively a web-based 'community portal' using open source software and techniques. While adopting these progressive development ideals has brought notable benefits, they have also posed significant challenges for the parties involved. In particular, mis-matched expectations, budget squeezes, and slipped schedules have been attributed to the approach being too participatory and too open. We examine these claims and offer insights into community-oriented, participatory, open source development projects.
This paper describes six creativity support tools we developed to foster community engagement and expression with robotics and sensing, assessing the benefits and shortcomings of each tool. From the descriptions of these tools and their uses, we highlight two issues. The first is the challenge of, and a general strategy for, enabling informed speculation with unfamiliar technologies. The second issue is that in enabling such speculation, the research process is opened to significant shifts in trajectory. These shifts concomitantly serve as markers of technological fluency and challenge the research project, reinforcing the value of a community co-design approach.
This paper describes how a project to challenge digital exclusion resulted in GeezerPower: an artwork that is both a statement about reusable technologies and about older people's continuing interest in the world of the future. We use the story of its production to illustrate and reflect on new methods for engaging people in decisions about the design of technology. And we explore how creative practice informed the design of an intervention workshop inspired by performance art and an exhibition of artists collaborating with older people. We conclude with some comments on marginalization, engagement and envisioning futures.
Today, commodity technologies like mobile phones - once symbols of status and wealth - have become deeply woven into social and economic participation in Western society. Despite the pervasiveness of these technologies, there remain groups who may not have extensive access to them but who are nonetheless deeply affected by their presence in everyday life. In light of this, we designed, built, and deployed a ubiquitous computing system for one such overlooked group: the staff and residents at a shelter for homeless mothers. Our system connects mobile phones, a shared display, and a Web application to help staff and residents stay connected. We report on the adoption and use of this system over the course of a 30 week deployment, discussing the substantial impact our system had on shelter life and the broader implications for such socio-technical systems that sit at the juncture of social action and organizational coordination.
Many contemporary approaches to environmental sustainability focus on the end-consumer. In this panel, we explore lessons from small food producers for future development of HCI as an agency of sustainable ways of being. We argue that attention to the relationship small producers have to the environment and their experiences of interrelations between environmental, economic, and social sustainability suggest new foundational issues for sustainable HCI research.
The design and use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has now evolved beyond its workplace origins to the wider public, expanding to people who live at the margins of contemporary society. Through field work and participatory co-design with homeless shelter residents and care providers we have explored design at the common boundary of these two "publics." We describe the design of the Community Resource Messenger (CRM), an ICT that supports both those in need and those attempting to provide care in a challenging environment. The CRM consists of three components: 1) a message center that pools messages to and from mobile users into a shared, persistent forum; 2) a text and voice messaging gateway linking the mobile phones of the homeless with the web-enabled computer facilities of the care providers; 3) a shared message display accessible from mobile texting, voice, e-mail, and the web, helping the two groups communicate and coordinate for mutual good. By democratizing design and use of technology at the margins of society, we aim to engage an entire "urban network," enabling shared awareness and collective action in each public.
ICT support for transnational social movements and civil society organizations is an important field of research: not only due to the increased political importance of this sector in a globalizing world but also due to their organizational characteristics. Transnational social movement organizations are typically characterized by a lack of resources, an absence of formal hierarchical structures, and differences in languages and culture among the activists. In order to design appropriate technological support for social activists' communities, it is important to understand their work practices which widely differ from traditional business organizations. This paper investigates into the organizational practices of the European Social Forum, in particular its 2008 meeting in Malmo, Sweden. We describe organizational practices in preparing and conducting the event. Since the goal of our research is directed towards enhancing the capabilities of social movements by means of ICT, we focus particularly on the usage of ICT.
We investigate informing public deliberation regarding major land use and transportation decisions with the results from a sophisticated computer simulation of urban development. Our specific focus is on indicators that portray key results from the simulations. Our design addresses a number of challenges, including responding to the values and interests of diverse stakeholders, making documentation ready-to-hand, and balancing the value of fairness with presenting a diverse set of advocacy positions. We use Value Sensitive Design as our theory and design methodology; our theoretical framework also draws on Habermas's theories of legitimation and communicative action. Our work contributes to CSCW as an example of designing a system for effective use in an environment with multiple stakeholders who have fundamental disagreements, and we conclude by drawing lessons for other environments with these characteristics.
We analyze a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community System (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. There were complex challenges in creating this infrastructural tool, ranging from simple lack of resources to complex organizational and intellectual communication failures and tradeoffs. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and interface, and extensive user needs assessment, feedback, and analysis, many users experienced difficulties in signing on and use. The study was conducted during a time of unprecedented growth in the Internet and its utilities (1991-1994), and many respondents turned to the World Wide Web for their information exchange. Using Bateson's model of levels of learning, we analyze the levels of infrastructural complexity involved in system access and designer-user communication. We analyze the connection between systems development aimed at supporting specific forms of collaborative knowledge work, local organizational transformation, and large-scale infrastructural change.
This paper explores the 'issue-oriented' perspective on public involvement in politics opened up by recent research in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This research proposes that public controversy around techno-scientific issues is dedicated to the articulation of these issues and their eventual accommodation in society. It does not, however, fully answer the question of why issue formation should be appreciated as a crucial dimension of democratic politics. To address this question, I turn to the work of two early 20th-century American pragmatists: John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. In their work on democracy in industrial society, they conceived of public involvement in politics as being occasioned by, and providing a way to settle, controversies that existing institutions were unable to resolve. Moreover, Dewey developed a 'socio-ontological' understanding of issues, which suggests that people's involvement in politics is mediated by problems that affect them. Dewey and Lippmann thus provide important argumentative resources for further elaborating the approach to public involvement developed in STS. STS research has also developed a 'socio-ontological' approach, as it focuses on the 'attachments' that people mobilize (and that mobilize people) in the performance of their concern with public affairs. Such an approach provides an alternative to discursivist analysis of the role of 'issue framing' in the involvement of publics in politics.
This paper foregrounds the long-term perspective and the role of information management in creating infrastructure to support collaborative ecological research. The case study of the long-term ecological research network is an ongoing research collaboration that integrates ethnographic and action research approaches. We describe three interdependent elements of science, data and technology for which information management provides support, and the articulation work needed for balancing their inherent tensions and the requirements generated by short and long term timeframes. We further describe information managers' learning community and collaboration-in-design, two mechanisms created within the LTER for continuing technology development over the long-term. The notion of infrastructuring is related to ecological information management as an ongoing design process that highlights participation and co-construction, as well as the complex relationships between the long-term, data, participants, collaborations, information systems, and infrastructure. The understudied area that entails issues of long-term, care/maintenance, and infrastructure presents challenges for the design of large-scale collaborative information systems.
. Many manufacturing enterprises are now trying to introduce various forms of flexible work organizations on the shop floor. However, existing computer-based production planning and control systems pose severe obstacles for autonomous working groups and other kinds of shop floor control to become reality. The research reported in this paper is predicated on the belief that the CSCW approach could offer a strategy for dealing with this problem. The paper describes the field work and its constructive outcome: a system that assists shop-floor teams in dealing with the complexities of day-to-day production planning by supporting intelligent and responsible workers in their situated coordination activities on the shop floor. ganization in the form of job enlargement and introduction of production groups on the shop floor that would have control over day-to-day task allocation and production planning and control. Over the following years, a number of `sociotechnical ' experiments with work...
This thesis presents contestational design, a unique form of design activity whose aim is promote particular agendas in contested political arenas. I propose a framework for analyzing contestational design processes, which I then apply to two initiatives that developed communications infrastructure for activist groups. The first case study is TXTmob, an SMS-broadcast system that I developed with an ad-hoc coalition of activists to support mass mobilizations during the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. It has been used by thousands of people and has inspired new projects in both the nonprofit and commercial sectors. The second case study is Dialup Radio, a telephone-based independent media system that I developed with a civil society organization in Zimbabwe. It was intended to disseminate activist information, particularly to Zimbabwe's rural poor. Despite limited infrastructure and government restrictions, several prototypes were produced and tested in Zimbabwe. After describing each case study individually, I turn to a comparison of their respective processes and the artifacts that each produced. Examining the cases side by side, I identify a set of common issues with which contestational designers contend at various points in the design process. Finally, I describe a set of organizing principles that distinguish contestational design from other kinds of design activity.
This 2007 book considers how agencies are currently figured at the human-machine interface, and how they might be imaginatively and materially reconfigured. Contrary to the apparent enlivening of objects promised by the sciences of the artificial, the author proposes that the rhetorics and practices of those sciences work to obscure the performative nature of both persons and things. The question then shifts from debates over the status of human-like machines, to that of how humans and machines are enacted as similar or different in practice, and with what theoretical, practical and political consequences. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences, humanities and computing, the author argues for research aimed at tracing the differences within specific sociomaterial arrangements without resorting to essentialist divides. This requires expanding our unit of analysis, while recognizing the inevitable cuts or boundaries through which technological systems are constituted.
This article explores the "fair trial" as a good practice for the construction of public proof. If proof signifies closure on matter(s) at hand, and publicness is taken to signify both "access to" and "participation in" the construction of proof by the publics concerned, the authors contend that the "fair trial" is a good example of building public proof and that its backbone constraints can be of great interest to the defenders and advocates of participative Technology Assessment (pTA), especially citizens' juries.
Rather than attempting to predict or even imagine specific media futures, I am concerned with how to locate present associations and expectations that serve to encourage particular futures and discourage others. Drawing on relational and performative theories including actor-network theory and a sociology of expectations, researchers are encouraged to critically examine how we approach our work today, along with our very definitions of—and how we understand relations between—humans, computers, and everyday urban life. The article closes with a set of five possible questions to stimulate reflection and conversation about any futures we seek to describe or explain.
CHI researchers are beginning a shift from studying technology use in uncommon or exotic communities to designing and deploying technology interventions into those same settings. This paper picks up on these recent developments and further examines the impact and implication of using a bespoke technology platform within the context of providing shelter and basic social services to homeless mothers and their children. I build on findings from a previous system deployment by describing targeted changes made to the technology, the design impetus for making those changes, and the resulting impact those changes had on the relationship between shelter staff, residents, and the information they shared via the system. By way of the findings reported here, I continue to develop the framing of Deweyan publics as a way to scaffold an environmental approach to technology design in contexts with multiple and diverse stakeholders.
Participatory design – the direct involvement of end-users and other stakeholders in design – has become a standard design paradigm in informatics, that is, in developing information systems, applications, infrastructures, and associated work practices. Community informatics, which addresses the impacts and utilisation of information technology to facilitate community life, is a challenging, but important domain for further developing participatory design.
Working with communities around social change presents a challenge to common HCI methods, as politics often comes to the fore. In some cases, the politics of a community are explicit, for example, when working with activists or advocacy groups. In other cases, political aspects are less explicit but surface in considering the allocation of resources or in groups wherein issues of race, gender or class are of major importance. To address these dynamics, HCI researchers have to go beyond traditional HCI tools and metrics, which too often bracket out the political in an effort to focus on the instrumental issues and uses of technology. This panel juxtaposes several community-based HCI research projects in which politics have been a significant factor and asks "How do we address the
The use of ICTs in the public sector has long been touted for its potential to transformthe institutionsthat governand pro- vide social services. The focus, however,haslargelybeen on systems that are used within particular scales of the public sector, such as at the scale of state or national government, the scale of regional or municipal entity, or at the scale of local service providers. The work presented here takes aim at examining ICT use that crosses these scales of influence and accountability. We report on a year long ethnographic investigation conducted at a variety of social service outlets to understand how a shared information system crosses the boundaries of these very distinct organizations. We put for- ward that such systems are central to the work done in the public sector and represent a class of collaborative work that has gone understudied.
Technology, it is argued, has the potential to improve everyone's life: from the workplace, to entertainment, to easing chores around the home. But what of people who have neither job nor home? We undertook a qualitative study of the homeless population in a metropolitan U.S. city to better understand what it means to be homeless and how technology-from cell phones to bus passes-affects their daily lives. The themes we identify provide an array of opportunities for technological interventions that can empower the homeless population. Our investigation also reveals the need to reexamine some of the assumptions made in HCI about the relationship people have with technology. We suggest a broader awareness of the social context of technology use as a critical component when considering design innovation for the homeless.
The paper reviews some aspects of the procurement and development of large scale systems and finds that there is still a high failure rate, which is especially visible in the public sector. It argues that the Participatory Design (PD) perspective offers cogent explanations for these failures, and can plausibly claim that it would do much better if its paradigm is given a serious chance. Yet members of the PD community seem mostly reluctant to become engaged in such developments, and the actual involvement of PD in these areas remains limited. The paper argues for PD's collective engagement and proposes a two-stage strategy for achieving this. It reviews this agenda from the perspective of PD as a political movement, and argues that this kind of involvement is 'reformist' but defensible. It will be difficult to persuade governments to take on this experimental strategy, but it should be possible.
Nonprofit social service organizations provide the backbone of social support infrastructure in the U.S. and around the world. As the ecology of information exchange moves ever- more digital, nonprofit organizations with limited resources and expertise struggle to keep pace. We present a quali- tative investigation of two nonprofit outreach centers pro- viding service to the homeless in a U.S. metropolitan city. Despite similar goals shared by these organizations, appar- ent differences in levels of computerization, volunteerism, and organizational structure demonstrate the challenges in attempting to adopt technology systems when resources and technical expertise are highly constrained.
In this contribution we investigate how results from the ongoing discussion about 'e- Infrastructures' can be used to improve the design of IT infrastructures in organizations. We first establish a perspective on organizational IT as 'work infrastructure' that focuses on the infrastructural nature of organizational Information Systems and describe challenges for designing within and for this type of infrastructure. Then we elaborate on possible use of concepts from the e-infrastructure discussion, in particular on the concept of 'infrastructuring' as it was developed by Star and Ruhleder (1996) and Star and Bowker (2002). Using their 'salient characteristics of infrastructure' we describe the methodological approach of 'Infrastructuring' to develop methodological and tool support for all stakeholders' activities that contribute to the successful establishment of an information system usage (equivalent to a work infrastructure improvement). We illustrated our ideas by drawing on a case in which new work infrastructures were introduced into an organizational context and by mapping out existing and possible tool support for 'infrastructuring'.
This article considers how the figure of the ``user'' is deployed to imagine the assembling of location-based mobile phone technologies in the context of UK policy. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, we address the performativity of the ``user'' in the think tank Demos' publication Mobilisation. In the process, we analyze how discourses about users enact particular futures that feature arrangements of, for example, persons, mobile phone technologies, and political institutions. We present two narrative strategies operating in Mobilisation: first, the purification of the social and technological in the portrayal of futures and their impediments; second, how existing, emergent, and future users serve as ``narrative joints'', reconnecting the social and technological in the enactment of preferred policy trajectories. In conclusion, we explore Mobilisation as a `catalogue of expectations' in which the representation of a multiplicity of users is itself performative, enacting a particular future policy terrain while bracketing off others.
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