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Care-full Design Sprints, Online? Addressing Gaps in Cultural
Access and Inclusion during Covid-19 with Vulnerable
Communities in London and Tokyo
Kit Braybrooke
King’s College London
United Kingdom
Stephanie Janes
King’s College London
United Kingdom
Chihiro Sato
Keio University
Japan
ABSTRACT
What does it mean to invite vulnerable communities to the table
in times of crisis not just as subjects, but as co-designers, in ways
that facilitate nourishing and care-full relations? In this paper, we
present the case of an online design sprint involving two groups of
diverse participants in London and Tokyo as the Covid-19 pandemic
unfolded. This modied design sprint model, which we describe as a
’care-full design stroll’, integrated co-design approaches with ethics
of care to oer remote cultural experiences aimed at addressing
inequalities of access and inclusion faced by the arts and cultural
sectors in Japan and the UK. We analyse data from ethnographic
observations, interviews and surveys in both nations to illustrate
the challenges and opportunities of facilitating design sprints on-
line. Our ndings show how care-full co-design, underpinned by
concepts of thinking-with and working-alongside, can be facilitated
in online-only and/or limited terrains, in ways that nourish cultural
organisations and their publics in times of great uncertainty. We
conclude with a set of six design principles which provide practical
recommendations for the eective facilitation of future care-full
co-design sprints for groups working in a variety of settings.
CCS CONCEPTS
•Human-centered computing →User centered design
;
Par-
ticipatory design
;
Ethnographic studies
;
•Applied comput-
ing →Arts and humanities
;
Collaborative learning
;
•Social
and professional topics →Gender;Age.
KEYWORDS
care, co-design, cultural heritage, design sprints, digital inclusion,
access, covid19
ACM Reference Format:
Kit Braybrooke, Stephanie Janes, and Chihiro Sato. 2021. Care-full De-
sign Sprints, Online? Addressing Gaps in Cultural Access and Inclusion
during Covid-19 with Vulnerable Communities in London and Tokyo. In
C&T ’21: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communities
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C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seattle, WA, USA
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ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9056-9/21/06.. .$15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3461564.3461583
& Technologies - Wicked Problems in the Age of Tech (C&T ’21), June 20–
25, 2021, Seattle, WA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https:
//doi.org/10.1145/3461564.3461583
1 INTRODUCTION
As part of social distancing measures, arts and cultural organi-
sations around the world were forced to close their doors to the
public in early 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic [
5
]. The
ramications of this have been wide-ranging, exacerbating several
existing challenges to the sector in a global context, including the
diversication and democratisation of public access to arts and
culture, short and long-term economic and creative impacts, and
the impacts of cultural engagement on social cohesion [
47
,
60
].
The need for the empathy, intimacy, emotional connections, and
creativity fostered by cultural experiences is more acute now than
ever before, prompting organisations to rapidly reconsider their
digital public engagement strategies and re-purpose existing digital
content using limited resources. The result has been a proliferation
of remote digital experiences, ranging from virtual gallery tours
[
39
,
46
] to streamed theatre performances [
49
,
61
]. However, bar-
riers to access for hard-to-reach publics did not begin, and will
not end, with the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite initial appearances,
many remote cultural experiences are still not reaching the vulner-
able and socially isolated publics who may benet the most from
ongoing access to arts and culture.
Such groups are many and diverse, including those experiencing
disabilities or illnesses, elderly care homes residents and marginalised
groups with reference to class, place and identity who may already
feel excluded or unwelcome in arts and cultural organisations. Evi-
dence suggests digital participation can be critical for vulnerable
and isolated groups to connect with others, share a sense of commu-
nity, collaborate, work, play and feel engaged in social and political
life [
25
,
44
,
55
]. The data also illustrates how investing in cultural
participation fosters sustainable development by improving health
and wellbeing [
21
,
56
]. However, there are indications that these
same groups are vulnerable to the limits of digital engagement,
which can exacerbate inequalities of access [
4
,
30
]. In addition,
barriers to public participation (digital or otherwise) cannot be
addressed through a focus on technology usage alone [
16
]. The
pandemic has emphasised that the so-called ‘digital divide’ (and its
more nuanced iterations - see Section 5) may be more cavernous
than many of us in more privileged positions might have imagined.
Digital inclusion must be therefore considered more broadly and
holistically if it is to play a signicant role in genuinely widening
access to arts and cultural experiences.
The Accessing Cultural Experiences project thus sought to under-
stand how cultural producers in two major cities with rich arts and
25
C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seale, WA, USA Kit Braybrooke, Stephanie Janes, and Chihiro Sato
culture ecosystems - London and Tokyo - could provide genuinely
inclusive, remote cultural experiences with/for isolated participants
under these challenging circumstances. It drew together a consor-
tium of makers, entrepreneurs, museum and gallery professionals,
and community partners, as well as students and early-career pro-
fessionals studying in creative elds. Through a series of adapted
design sprint workshops, participants co-created practical design
ideas to address this problem. They also explored the possibilities
of experimental design processes by working with open access and
rapid prototyping approaches in online settings.
The project’s explicit goals were around idea generation and in-
tercultural exchange, but concerns quickly emerged around whether
the sprint format launched by companies like Google [
29
] allowed
for a genuine sense of care, connection and inclusivity to be re-
ected in its process and outputs. Participants were committed to
designing cultural experiences with care in mind, but key aspects
of the traditional participatory design process were challenged by
the circumstances of Covid-19, and experienced by producers and
publics alike. This ranged from practical diculties around user
research and testing with vulnerable groups, to reconceptualising
exactly who those groups were under lockdown conditions.
This paper therefore asks whether a more ‘care-full’ design sprint,
underpinned by concepts of thinking-with [
18
], working-alongside
[13, 14] and relational knowledge generation [33] could be bene-
cial during and beyond the pandemic, in ways that nourish both
cultural organisations and their publics. We explore whether an
adapted design sprint model can be facilitated entirely online, with
cultural producers in cities across two nations facing similar ex-
periences of isolation, vulnerability and anxiety as their publics
in a time of collective crisis. Using interviews and surveys with
participants, and observations collected during and after the sprints,
we examine the successes and failures of a care-full design sprint
model, such as the opportunities to foster a more relaxed and open
approach to workshop facilitation, and the diculties in facilitat-
ing for diverse needs in limited environments. We consider the
challenges and opportunities aorded by doing design sprints fully
online, such as the ability to mitigate uneven power dynamics, and
the management of exacerbated inequalities with regards to digital
inclusion and access. Finally, we oer practical recommendations
in the form of six design principles for the use of academics and
practitioners who plan to facilitate care-full design sprints online
for other kinds of projects.
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
In applying “care-based design” [
13
] approaches in our care-full de-
sign sprint model, we are informed by theoretical frameworks that
integrate concepts of care, relationality and ‘thinking-with’ [
22
]
from feminist technoscience and participatory design perspectives.
Our aim is to facilitate reciprocal relations of working alongside
- rather than simply designing for - the isolated and vulnerable
publics identied by project participants. Disciplines concerned
with technological mediation including human-computer interac-
tion (HCI), science and technology studies (STS) and design increas-
ingly recognise care-based approaches as a productive means of
designing with and alongside communities, with care understood
as integral to human, cultural and ecological development [
62
].
This positions care as “a fundamental relational quality of life" [
50
]
intertwined with the myriad and contingent relations of the “ecol-
ogy of selves” [
31
], human and non-human, which constitute our
world.
We draw in particular on theories of care as interdependency,
depicted in feminist studies of technology and ethics of care [
19
,
22
,
33
,
52
] as the “manifold range of doings” required to maintain
earthly relations, in ways that “create, hold together, and sustain
life and continue its diverseness” [
18
]. Such framings move beyond
portrayals of designing with (and for) care which place emphasis
on its moral and aective dynamics and situate it within the limited
bounds of particular contexts, such as nursing homes [
58
], hospi-
tals [
41
] and healthcare systems [
27
]. Instead, care is articulated
as an obligation shared by all living beings, the care-full relations
of which sociologist Maria Puig de la Bellacasa describes as con-
stituting a “collective disseminated force” of interrelated agencies
and materials for collective survival [
19
]. This understanding of
distributed reciprocity reclaims ethics of care from deterministic
notions such as “women are more moral than men” [
52
] by situating
care as a common responsibility. It also acknowledges the value
of the unseen reproductive labours involved in the doings of care-
full spaces on and o the web, from platform repair to community
management.
This perception of care as shared, distributed and symbiotic is
only one of many ways in which ethics of care are currently being
articulated. Anyone can claim to be an expert on care, and many
do - from tness gurus to global corporations, and this openness to
interpretation can lead to misuse and overuse. The transnational
care regimes of humanitarian aid campaigns have been found to
perpetuate rich world paternalism, for example, by reproducing
universalist assumptions about the kind of care which is deemed
required to address the diverse needs of groups categorised as
‘marginalised’ [
19
,
48
]. Portrayals of these groups as broken, de-
prived, wounded and hopeless is counterproductive, it is argued,
because this precipitates awed theories of change that fail to hon-
our how ethics of care are involve “complexity, contradiction, and
the self-determination of lived lives” [53].
We aim to reclaim care from these diuse terrains by addition-
ally working with ecofeminist scholar Donna Haraway’s notion of
thinking-with, which describes how the construction of knowledge
is never neutral and always situated - as a social production which
is brought into being from the agencies of multiple collaborating
subjectivities, knowledge relations, like care relations, are interde-
pendent and symbiotic [
22
–
24
]. By pointing out the ontological
politics of the positionalities we bring to care work, the concept of
thinking-with reminds us that the doings of thinking, knowing and
co-creating are never done in isolation. Our “relations of signicant
otherness transform those who relate and the worlds they live in”,
and the ways we enter into these relations aect not only our own
identities, but also the ecologies we build [
18
]. By committing to
care-full design that thinks with, not for, we share responsibility
with project participants, rather than speaking for them. We ac-
knowledge that we are already enmeshed in a “hermeneutic circle”
of co-design which is mutually impactful [
33
], and that care, like
other relational work, populates worlds.
26
Towards Care-full Design Sprints C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seale, WA, USA
3 RESEARCH CONTEXT AND
METHODOLOGY
3.1 The Covid-19 context in London and Tokyo
While the project focused on building the kinds of ‘new worlds’
that might be oered through remotely accessible cultural expe-
riences, it also needed to address the daily realities of its partic-
ipants, who were faced with Covid-19 in London and Tokyo. As
the pandemic unfurled and social distancing guidelines came to
govern every aspect of people’s everyday lives, feminist geographer
Doreen Massey’s notion of space as “the product of interrelations”
had never felt more prescient [
37
]. Spatial theorists like Massey
and Henri Lefebvre have argued “the way we imagine space has
eects”, because space is not only experienced as territories on a
map, but also as the product of intersecting social relations, which
make up an ever-evolving web of cooperation, dominance and con-
trol [
32
,
36
,
37
]. Framing space as a social construction highlights
the many dierentiations of mobility and access experienced by
social actors according to local (and global) ows of interaction.
Dynamics such as gender, race and class thus inuence individual
experiences of space and place, seen in the degree to which move-
ment between nations or neighbourhood streets at night is possible
according to one’s social demographics, history and location [
35
].
The spatial freedoms aorded to project participants in London and
Tokyo were also dierentiated according to the levels of mobility
and access they had been aorded by national governments with
reference to age, location, gender, health and occupation. This re-
quired an increased sensitivity to the particular Covid-19 context
of each nation.
Figure 1: Isolated and vulnerable publics during Covid-19,
identied by project participants as potential co-designers
In London, a combination of local and national restrictions were
introduced as part of the government’s strategy to suppress out-
breaks, starting with the UK’s rst lockdown in March 2020. An
ever-evolving system of tiered social distancing restrictions saw
dierent parts of the country going under lockdown at dierent
times. Early data reveals how a year of lockdowns has exacerbated
inequalities and issues of social inclusion faced by the UK’s most
vulnerable communities (see Fig.4). The number of over-50s who
will experience loneliness is projected to reach two million by 2025,
compared to 1.4 million in 2017 - a 49% increase in 10 years [
1
].
Despite a prevalence of mutual aid campaigns, the percentage of
people in the UK who cite feeling positively about their area has
declined since the pandemic started, from 70% in 2012 to just 56% in
2020, with the UK’s most deprived regions experiencing the greatest
declines [
9
]. A British Red Cross survey of the impacts of Covid-19
re
ƒ
strictions found two groups were hit hardest by loneliness and
poor mental health: the “newly vulnerable” who rarely required
social care before the pandemic and are now isolated, and those
already struggling prior to the pandemic, who are now “on the
brink” of poverty [17].
In Tokyo, the Covid-19 situation started with the devastating
Diamond Princess cruise ship pandemic in February 2020 [
40
]. The
nation of Japan went through its rst phase of mild lockdown from
April to May 2020, and a second phase from January to March 2021
which was limited to urban prefectures such as the greater Tokyo
and Osaka areas. A survey of 11,000 people aged 18-89 experienc-
ing the lockdown revealed that over a third experienced mild-to-
moderate psychological distress, while 11.5% experienced serious
distress during the rst phase [
63
]. Healthcare workers, those with
a history of treatment for mental illness, and younger adults (aged
18-39) were “particularly vulnerable”, and the causes were due to
high loneliness, poor interpersonal relationships, Covid-19-related
sleeplessness and anxiety, deterioration of household economy, and
work and academic diculties. In addition, the higher education
sector in Japan had more restrictive regulations than other parts of
the world [
26
]. Physical campuses of universities remained closed
even after lockdown ended, meaning college students had to stay
at home and take online courses even throughout the national “Go
to Travel” campaign—a nation-wide travel-boosting campaign that
oered discounts on travel charges, and issued coupons for any
consumption at the travel destinations within Japan from July 2020
until the second lockdown in January 2021 [
3
]. From these contexts,
the “vulnerable” are no longer limited to age or the physical capa-
bility of the human bodies, but includes the younger generations
whom are bound to stay at home from their institutions. Given
these cultural contexts, project groups in London and Tokyo took
on a slightly dierent focus and generated divergent outputs, as
outlined in the analysis section.
3.2 Research methods
ACE was pitched as ‘rapid response’ research into the impact of
the unfolding pandemic on arts and cultural sectors in March 2020.
A design sprint method therefore initially seemed an appropriate
approach. Popularised by design agencies like IDEO [
15
] and tech
companies like Google [
29
], design sprints are also conducted in
open source community projects like Mozilla [
6
]. They are typi-
cally used for developing products through an iterative process of
prototyping and testing ecacy in rapid succession. Designer Jake
Knapp, who created a 5-day design sprint model for Google, states:
“You can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months
of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal
product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data
from a realistic prototype” [29].
Participatory, human-centered co-design is crucial to the success
of a sprint. It should bring together people from disparate parts of an
organisation, and integrate user research throughout the process to
remain focused on actual rather than perceived user needs. Design
sprints are not widely used in arts and cultural organisations, but
one example is a recent project to improve waynding in the British
Museum [
45
]. This highly compact sprint ran over two half-days,
27
C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seale, WA, USA Kit Braybrooke, Stephanie Janes, and Chihiro Sato
using design exercises and interviews with visitors to break with
the museum’s usual solutions and stakeholder-focused mode of
thinking to prototype new concepts.
Sprints have also been considered “disruptive and collaborative
methods for addressing socially complex problems” [
57
] in relation
to social and healthcare issues [
28
]. Politics of care become cru-
cial for co-design in these spaces, requiring “mindfulness - deep
listening, observational and critical evaluation skills, physical and
mental agility, humility, resilience and a collective rather than indi-
vidual approach.” [
57
]. The process thus becomes less concerned
with idea generation alone, and is more an “attempt to co-design
awareness and understanding, and scaold connections among peo-
ple, some of which may manifest in enhanced design, deployment,
customisation or use of ICTs” [33].
Design sprints therefore spoke to the project’s aims to gener-
ate workable solutions for launching remote cultural experiences
- while having the potential to address participants’ need to chal-
lenge their understanding of isolation and vulnerability in relation
to their publics, themselves and each other, as a way of intervening
in a design challenge “from within” [
34
]. This reects our theoret-
ical framework emphasising the relational nature of knowledge
generation, with co-design not necessarily a "linear trajectory of
design’s production from start to nish. Instead, it is a hermeneutic
circle: the world we design is in turn designing us, inscribing how
we are being and becoming with others" [33].
However, the traditional intense pace of design sprints over a
short period was neither practical nor ethical at this stage of the
pandemic, when participants were already overwhelmed. It was
also not conducive to the ‘mindfulness’ Valentine et al. suggest is
necessary for addressing complex social problems via design think-
ing. Much of their thoughtful framework was dicult to transfer
into a remote model that would be facilitated online, e.g. “the envi-
ronment in which a design sprint is held is mindfully designed[...]
close attention to detail is paid towards the amount of natural light,
the volume of space for people to move freely during the event, the
provision of materials to support prototyping [...] adequate internet
provision, the quality of audio and digital technology to present
information” [
57
]. Our design ‘sprints’ were therefore reconceptu-
alised as design ‘strolls’, to be described later in this section.
3.3 Participant recruitment
In the case of both groups, the prevailing aim was to recruit par-
ticipants who had a desire to act as producers for the extent of
the project, and build prototypes in collaboration with vulnerable
publics. As described in Section 3, the project’s identication of,
and engagement with, these co-designer publics was contingent on
the backgrounds and aims of project participants themselves, and
the circumstances of Covid-19 which surrounded the project. We
believed, for example, that we would be able to access the relevant
communities during the rst few design strolls, and in particular a
session in London which focused on the creation of user personas
that reected on the subjectivities and locations of these publics.
Once participants had determined the vulnerable communities they
would like to collaborate with, however, the realities of recruit-
ing these publics as co-designers during Covid-19 turned out to
be much more complicated than we could have imagined, as is
explored further in Section 4.
In London, 25 participants were recruited from the project team’s
extended networks of cultural producers working across arts, cul-
tural and community organisations. This included: artists, digital
makers and creatives, museum and gallery professionals, charity
and community organisations, academic researchers and broadcast-
ers. Initial contacts were encouraged to suggest others from their
own networks, and this snowball sampling resulted in a broad con-
sortium including representatives from Tate Galleries, BBC, Beth-
lem Gallery, AGE UK, Maker Assembly, British Museum, Fitzwilliam
Gallery, Donmar Warehouse (among others), freelance researchers
and creative practitioners. It should be noted that the London-
centric focus of these workshops does not take into account impor-
tant regional dierences in the socio-economic impact of Covid-19,
or tier-based restrictions on the arts and cultural sector. Future
projects might incorporate participants from more regionally-based
organisations.
Recruitment for the Tokyo workshops took a dierent approach,
inviting participants from the project team’s existing networks of
younger generations in Japan. More than half of the participants
were university students with interests in arts, cultural, and cre-
ative experiences. Participants’ backgrounds were varied, ranging
from design to engineering, data science, business and economics.
The project team invited four guest speakers to give a talk from
the second to the fth workshops who were professionals in arts
and cultural elds in Japan. These included tea meisters, classical
music record label managers, catalysts from creative design rms,
and museum curators. Around 40 participants were enrolled at
the beginning of the workshops, with an average of 20 regularly
attending from the second week onwards.
Participants in both sprints were faced with similar challenges
due to pandemic restrictions. All participants were working from
home under various constraints, including needing to acquire ad-
equate internet connection and IT equipment to participate, time
and energy constraints related to work, family and/or caring re-
sponsibilities, nancial constraints, general fatigue and anxiety, etc.
By spreading the design sprint length into several weeks instead
of a few days, the design stroll format aimed to address some of
these challenges by giving participants more free time to reect
and disengage between sessions.
3.4 Format of London workshops
Rather than compressing the process into ve days, 25 participants
took part in six online workshops conducted via Zoom between
July and October 2020. Each session lasted two hours, and included
at least one guest speaker, followed by a collaborative co-design
activity. Asynchronous interim tasks were assigned for participants
to complete in preparation for the next workshop. This was aimed
at reducing the amount of time required in synchronous meetings,
and to give space for reection. Participants were encouraged to
chat informally via Slack throughout the process, and collaborative
tools Miro (See Fig. 3 left), and Padlet were used for ideation and as
a hub for project resources respectively. The project team used a
Google Drive folder to collaboratively plan the process (See Fig.2
left).
28
Towards Care-full Design Sprints C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seale, WA, USA
Participants received an email a few days in advance of each
workshop with an agenda and relevant meeting links. Smaller break-
out groups were used during workshops 1-4. The research team
tried to ensure each breakout group was as diverse as possible and
these were changed each week to allow participants the opportu-
nity to speak to as many dierent people as possible. The intention
was to avoid a proliferation of the kind of depoliticization dynam-
ics commonly evident in co-production processes that Turnhout
et al. argue can “reinforce rather than mitigate existing unequal
power relations” by avoiding ‘dicult’ conversations in ways that
entrench the authority of elite actors and interests [
54
]. Their study
of co-production in scientic contexts warns that "the outcomes
of participatory interventions can even be paradoxical, reinforcing
the problems that they intended to solve [which are] sanctioned
or legitimized by the participatory process" [
54
]. As such, they ar-
gue, it is important to outline meaningfully where, and how, these
processes might fail by (re)politicising co-production as a space for
“pluralism and the contestation of knowledge” [
54
]. Other practical
solutions aimed at mitigating inequalities in the project included
ensuring participants were adequately paid for their time (particu-
larly freelancers and/or those otherwise precariously employed),
addressing inherent European and/or Western bias by de-centering
academic knowledges and encouraging cross-cultural exchange,
and thinking about the problematics of knowledge-making as a
political practice.
In attempting to implement a more care-full approach to facilita-
tion, attendance was made as exible as possible, and participants
were advised to nominate a colleague to attend in their place or se-
lect a teammate to be their voice in the workshop if they were unable
to attend. A 10 minute break was built into each two-hour session
in addition to a combination of passive and active participation, and
extra time was oered in the nal week to allow participants more
time to work on their concepts together. Finally, a code of care was
drafted by the project team and shared at the start of the rst work-
shop. This was informed by code of conduct and ‘netiquette’ models
typically used by hackers, makers and other technical communities
to negotiate acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and mitigate
unequal power relations in online settings [
42
]. Participants were
encouraged to take collective ownership of the code of care (and by
extension the design strolls and their outcomes) by anonymously
adding their own additions and suggestions.
3.5 Format of Tokyo workshops
Like the London workshops, the Tokyo workshops were devel-
oped as a design stroll rather than a sprint. The Tokyo workshops
featured six consecutive virtual workshops in September and Oc-
tober 2020, conducted online via Zoom. Each session lasted two
hours, and included one external guest speaker and a design activ-
ity. Sessions were followed by an informal gathering set outside
of working hours, and delivered on the Remo platform. Unlike the
London workshops, interim tasks were not assigned. Instead, the
project team followed up during the week by giving feedback or
paraphrasing the current status of the design as preparation, via
Slack. This was aimed to overcome the diculties for participants
of not being able to keep up with the workload, and wanting to
have valuable conversations in between sessions. Like the London
Figure 2: Structure of London and Tokyo design strolls
workshops, participants were encouraged to communicate with
each other directly via Slack throughout the journey. All except the
nal digital tea party was conducted in Japanese. The project team
used a shared Google Drive, Keynote slides on iCloud, and Slack to
collaborate (See Fig.2 right).
3.6 London-Tokyo connections and project
evaluation
Diverse timezone and scheduling needs meant the Tokyo and Lon-
don workshops needed to run separately. This enabled the Keio
University research team in Tokyo to observe the London work-
shops, and adapt their own sessions accordingly. Participants from
both cities came together at the end of the design stroll process
for a nal digital tea party, where they exchanged experiences
across borders, despite the Covid-19 limits which continued to re-
strict social interactions to online spaces. All participants received
a small postcard invitation to the tea party in the post, featuring a
customised artwork commemorating their collaborations and two
dierent types of tea to taste during the party. After the tasting, par-
ticipants chatted in breakout groups about design ideas, lockdown
experiences, and other matters over a cup of tea.
Workshop evaluation was conducted via anonymous participant
feedback surveys, digital ethnographic observation, and in-depth
interviews. Ethnographic observation was conducted through ‘im-
mersive cohabitation’ [
8
] across the project’s online eld sites, with
all participants made aware of, and consenting to, the recording
and transcription of relevant workshops for data analysis purposes.
Surveys were conducted after workshops 4 and 6 for London par-
ticipants (9 responses), and immediately after each workshop for
Tokyo participants (62 responses). Participant interviews were con-
ducted by a digital anthropologist via recorded video conferencing
platforms (9 interviews with London participants, 10 with Tokyo
participants) which were then coded thematically [10, 43].
29
C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seale, WA, USA Kit Braybrooke, Stephanie Janes, and Chihiro Sato
4 ANALYSIS 1: CARE-FULL DESIGN STROLL
PERSONAS, PROTOTYPES AND
CONNECTIONS
The next two sections discuss outputs generated in the project’s
design strolls, and key ndings about participant experiences from
surveys and interviews. Together, these insights oer practical
suggestions for future researchers looking to develop more care-full
design sprints for online-only and blended online/oine settings.
4.1 Persona development for reconceptualising
vulnerable and/or isolated publics
When faced with the research question ‘what are the main problems
you are trying to solve in your work with vulnerable and isolated
communities’, participants across both groups wanted to better
understand the needs of these communities, and collaborate with
them directly, in ways that were inclusive and care-full. The London
Miro platform in particular captured their aims: “To not marginalise
participants by making assumptions about their status and needs”.
There was also a keen perception of intersecting challenges that
accompanied digital approaches: “Digital engagement brings very
dierent types of inequalities” and, as an anonymous post-it note
on Miro asked: “How can we design not only
for
, but also - and
even more importantly - with?”
These reections highlight a criticism of design sprints and other
participatory design methods, in that they risk paying lip-service
to genuinely inclusive co-design by co-opting participatory ap-
proaches to collaboration in ways that simply perform an awareness
of, rather than thoughtfully engage with, the structural dynamics
of inequality — a dynamic which Sarah Ahmed has referred to as
the ‘liberal promise’ of inclusion [
2
]. This can serve to obstruct,
rather than address, inequities by designing cultural experiences
‘for’ rather than ‘with’ the communities most impacted [
38
]. For
example, in their study of the Africatown project in Seattle, USA,
O’Leary et al. describe how conventional design methods such
as participatory and co-design workshops were implemented by
powerful architecture and design companies in ways that rein-
forced racialised displacement and discrimination long experienced
by local Black communities [
51
]. Collaborative co-design must
not neglect to acknowledge the unequal power dynamics at its
core.
Global social distancing measures brought these dynamics into
sharp relief for participants - a sudden, enforced shared experience,
foregrounding the entangled nature of social and cultural devel-
opment. Participants found themselves in a slightly paradoxical
situation, where their own isolation created a closer connection to
the publics with whom they sought co-create, but in the context of
extreme social and physical disconnection. Despite repeated eorts,
project participants found access to those publics - e.g. elderly care
home residents - was severely, if not completely, limited, rendering
genuine co-creation and inclusion even more dicult, and at the
same time simultaneously more important. While drawing on their
own experiences was valuable, participants risked conating these
with the dierently-felt experiences of marginalised communities,
and needed to avoid assuming and appropriating those experiences
as their own.
As Bellacasa [
18
] notes, “Knowledge committed to thinking from
marginalised experiences could be better knowledge [by helping]
cultivate alternative epistemologies that blur dominant dualisms"
— but this can all too quickly turn into thinking-for, by “appro-
priating the recipients of ‘our’ care, instead of relating ourselves
to them”. We were conscious that the sprints therefore needed to
cultivate participants’ sense of thinking-with as much as possi-
ble. We thus worked to situate our approach to care-full design
as a mode of “on-going designing, where transformation locates
agency in embedding and entangling people’s lived paths and expe-
riences with others” [
33
], by making space for reciprocal relations
through a rotating group of guest speakers, as well as drop-in
participants from vulnerable communities, who had the capac-
ity to represent the needs and experiences of the project’s focus
groups.
This was a signicant limitation in the project, however, which
was only partially addressed by the development of user personas.
London participants were asked to interview at least one person
whom they felt represented the vulnerable publics they wanted to
work with, as well as considering how their own experiences of
isolation were associated, and separate, from those of the project’s
focus publics. Tokyo participants addressed these concerns by
considering a specic set of pandemic-related constraints faced
by publics they shared commonalities with (e.g. students stuck
at home in lockdown) as a starting point with reference to dy-
namics of space, time, and technology, and built personas from
there.
Personas developed in the London workshops tended to skew
towards elderly and isolated publics, and communities adjacent
to urban museums for whom cultural access remained a concern,
such as migrants, overworked families and the underemployed —
reecting the existing publics that participants working in arts and
cultural heritage organisations were struggling to reach. Tokyo
participants added nuance to the initial set of constraints over
time to include groups such as minorities requiring digital skills
training, and frustrated art students unable to enter the studio.
In both sprints, the prevailing outcome was an identication of
just how many groups across all levels of society in Japan and the
UK had become newly vulnerable as a result of the multiple and
intersecting challenges of Covid-19 (see Fig.3 right).
The circumstances of the pandemic made it especially dicult to
nd commonalities across, and build consensus within, the work-
shops regarding who these vulnerable publics were, before even
starting to consider how they might be eectively included in a fully-
digital design process. Many of the communities we got in touch
with to join participants as co-designers (with a few notable excep-
tions, such as Age UK in London) told us that their constituents
would be unable to join the project as co-designers because of limita-
tions on access to digital technologies due to widespread lockdown
closures of libraries, museums, community centers and other open
spaces typically used for public access. On the other hand, these lim-
itations also highlighted the risk of over-generalising the regional
specicities of Covid-19 impacts on dierent social groups, and
encouraged a diverse rage of nal prototypes which reected on
these shifting realities, despite restrictions on physical interaction
imposed by the pandemic.
30
Towards Care-full Design Sprints C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seale, WA, USA
Figure 3: Left: Dot-voting, London. Right: Prototyping,
Tokyo. Both facilitated on Miro.
4.2 Developing practical, but innovative,
prototypes
By the end of the design strolls, London participants had delivered
six prototype concepts in total, and developed the rst four ideas
into storyboards:
(1)
A Virtual Reality (VR) Festival of cultural exchange between
communities focused on climate change.
(2)
Tech Workshops: Peer-led, experimental online workshops
for those who want to develop new tech skills.
(3)
Dial-A-Play: Pre-recorded ’radio’ plays on demand over the
telephone on freephone 0800 numbers.
(4)
Superhyperlocal trail: Players receive a series of texts and
prompts to engage in a local mystery-solving adventure.
(5)
Culture Ice Cream Van: Lo- travelling experiences at local
parks, community centres and care homes.
(6)
Remix the Hospital: Working with artists in residence in
hospital wards to augment existing infrastructures.
The Tokyo participants delivered six prototype ideas, and six
storyboards:
(1)
Online educational workshop for would-be ikebana teachers
(Japanese art of ower arranging).
(2)
Hospital theatre: A multisensory VR headset for the elderly
to attend an interactive comedy show.
(3)
Personal Movie Moments: Participants lm their daily lives;
a lter nds similar scenes from lms.
(4)
Online Art Camp: Amateur photographers take courses to
improve skills, and co-create albums online and oine.
(5)
Online Atelier for Art: Space for arts students in lockdown
to make friends and join a virtual exhibition.
(6)
360
°
Projection-Mapping: Users select from a series of envi-
ronments (e.g. coee shop, rainforest) to project into their
work/study space. Overly familiar rooms are enriched even
in monotonous lockdown life.
Many participants were new to the design stroll format, and ap-
preciated its focus on rapid ideation: "These workshops were quite
focused and results-driven, which felt very refreshing and dynamic"
(Survey respondent, London). However, participants also reected
that more time was needed to develop the prototype ideas, despite
the elongated design stroll format: “I feel like we just touched on
something, and I haven’t even got a chance to reiterate it that much”
(Marc, London). “I wanted to visualize it a bit more [... ] I think this
was the best we could do with this limited time” (Takashi, Tokyo).
Despite time limits, the prototypes inspired several participants
in both London and Tokyo to discuss how they would be inviting
elderly people, people with diverse mental health needs, and people
with visual and other sensory impairments to co-design future en-
counters: "The dial-up one was particularly good, and the ice-cream
van just appealed to me, because I think it’s an idea that could be
used in so many dierent ways, within a community [...] those
were the two that [...] I think would work the best for our [elderly]
client community groups" (Lorraine, Age UK, London).
These ndings suggest that the attempt to design- and think-with
online was, at least in some senses, successful. London participants
commented on the importance of panel feedback and dialogue with
publics as a key outcome: “Getting that direct feedback is really
important, because we’re not talking to ourselves, but to actual
potential users [...] What I miss the most in my current and last eight
years of my job as curator is, you don’t really have direct interviews
and conversations anymore with your audiences, and it’s a real
shame but that’s how it is, especially as a large institution” (Sandra,
Tate, London). "I think the cultural participation and interaction
and dialogue with the audience is the biggest thing [...] to take
away” (Daniel, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge).
However, in Japan the prototype development process was ar-
guably more successful as a shared experience of thinking-with,
in particular where its participants (many of them students them-
selves) individually identied with the experiences of the user per-
sonas they had developed: “Everyone understood the pain I had
as an art student studying under Covid-19. We talked about the
importance of space for art students. So I thought about what I
could do without using space, and my persona developed as an art
student” (Sakura, Art Student, Tokyo). Tokyo participant Takashi
noted that “many participants drew on their own experiences to
come up with ideas. For example, one of our team members, Ms.
Takahashi, shared with me how dicult it is for her children with
Down syndrome to communicate with others[...] I got the impres-
sion that there are many people who cherish their own experiences
or original experiences and use them as a starting point for their
ideation, and this impression has remained with me”. Experiences
that enabled personal and professional skills development during
the static experience of lockdown were identied as a particular
concern for Tokyo’s student participants. This fed into their user
personas, and was clearly expressed in nal persona concepts like
the online art workshops.
Time constraints aside, not all participants agreed on whether
the project’s goal to create viable prototypes for delivery to iso-
lated and/or vulnerable publics was fully successful. One Tokyo
participant noted that the feedback they had received on their pro-
totype was that it was not “very realistic [...] if we were to really
do it, I think there are many directions we could take it from there”
(Hiroko, Panasonic, Tokyo). Project team member Karin observed
that the London team was “denitely more realistic”, and that the
Tokyo participants were “more ambitious... more like a dreamer
[...] rather, they valued interesting, unique ideas", whereas the Lon-
don team focused “more on making existing ideas better”. These
dierences in approach suggest there is much fertile ground for fu-
ture cross-collaboration and thinking-with which brings disparate
cultures and national contexts together using digital approaches.
Future iterations might, for example, combine team members from
across London and Tokyo teams in each group, to try and more
31
C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seale, WA, USA Kit Braybrooke, Stephanie Janes, and Chihiro Sato
carefully balance experience, ambition, innovation and practicality.
Indeed, participants in both groups emphasised the value of the
interpersonal connections developed during the workshops, and
asked for more.
4.3 Interpersonal connections: Digital vs
non-digital approaches
Figure 4: Tweet about tea party invite and tea in the mail,
and tea party preparation between Tokyo and London.
The London prototypes also placed a stronger focus on low-tech
and non-digital experiences, an important element in re-
contextualising the ‘digital divide’ for isolated audiences during
the pandemic which is discussed further in Section 5. However,
there was an interesting parallel here in that the non-digital and/or
oine aspects of the sprints themselves (e.g. the customised art
postcard invitations and tea samples received in the post) were
also enthusiastically received by all participants, and specically
referred to in language that reected the care-full nature of the
sprints, and positioned these artefacts as care-full objects, which
ever so slightly diminished the ongoing sense of isolation: “I must
say having received the letter with the tea, it was really moving.
So that in itself is a very nice gesture for people that might feel
isolated in a way to get that[...] It was really special." (Sandra, Tate,
London). This reects ndings from participants in other kinds of
online workshops regarding the impact of physical objects when
working predominantly in online environments: “If people receive
something material that you made with your hands it is dierent,
because you send your warmth to another person, and maybe your
love or the mood you were in while you made it” [44].
This was not to say the online-only elements of the sprints did
not serve to develop enriching interpersonal connections. Partici-
pants in both groups commented on the inspiration gained from
meeting, making and thinking-with a diverse range of people they
may not have encountered otherwise. Lily, a participant in the
Tokyo workshops, found this both exciting and daunting: “At the
rst ice-breaker, we talked about foreign workers, and some of the
members of the group said that they were caregivers, had done
volunteer work with foreign workers, or wanted to open a museum
in the future. I felt like I had come to an amazing place, because I
knew that there were people who were actually doing things that I
was interested in. I was half excited that I could learn in such a place,
and half worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up.” This suggests
the modied sprint model did have some success in its aim to move
beyond product development and ideation and to “co-design aware-
ness and understanding, and scaold connections among people”
[
33
]. Tokyo participant Takashi felt this very keenly: "the best part
of the ACE workshop was the collision or co-creation with values
that were completely dierent from my own."
The expanded, care-full design stroll format was thus (to some
extent) able to create a welcoming digital space where there was a
genuine plurality of experiences, and encounters with dierence
that were valued by participants. The interviews and surveys ev-
idenced that the relaxed and open approach to participation and
facilitation in both groups was a signicant aspect of enabling these
congenial relations. Ryuji, a student in Tokyo, stated: “If I had to
pick one good thing, it would be [the Tokyo Project Leader]. The
spirit of challenge, the fact that you can try and if it doesn’t work,
you can think about it again.” One London survey respondent simi-
larly felt this contributed to a stronger emphasis on creativity and
casual engagement: "The facilitation was excellent [...] The low-
pressure messaging encouraged me to participate, in however small
a way, rather than drop out, & created positive feelings rather than
groans when project emails appeared. The strongly democratic /
collaborative decision making enabled a surprising amount of self-
generated progress, proving that creativity is the greatest resource
of all.”
Other elements of the design stroll format were less successful in
developing genuine connections amongst participants. There was
a desire from participants to connect more informally, but this was
dicult to instigate and facilitate in ways that suited everyone’s
schedules, particularly as Covid-19 unfolded and started to domi-
nate every aspect of daily life. London participants were reluctant
to engage informally on Slack, with several people citing they were
simply too overwhelmed by work and family responsibilities during
the pandemic. Tokyo participants, meanwhile, had a more positive
experience with Slack as well as the Remo meeting platform for
campre-style sessions hosted after each workshop: “We’re getting
closer! Every time I think about it, the atmosphere is great, easy to
talk to!” (Tokyo survey respondent).
Some of the less positive and nourishing group dynamics may
even have been unintentionally exacerbated by the design stroll
format. For example, the more relaxed approach to participation
proved hard to balance with the sprints’ need for strong group cohe-
sion and consensus to create viable outputs: "I think, more than half
of the sessions, the other teammates just were dropping in and out.
That made it dicult to solidify our ideas and make things concrete"
(Shozen, Tokyo). Maintaining interest in the stretched-out version
of the sprint was also challenging. Many London participants found
it dicult to complete interim tasks between workshops — contrary
to the intention of the slower stroll to reduce pressure on time and
allow for reection. The next section elaborates further on these
diculties.
5 ANALYSIS 2: THE GOOD AND THE BAD OF
CARE-FULL CO-DESIGN ONLINE
In this section, we will discuss some of the challenges of conduct-
ing care-full co-design in fully virtual settings - as well as some
unexpected benets of collaborating in limited and/or non-physical
environments.
32
Towards Care-full Design Sprints C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seale, WA, USA
5.1 Digital divide, digital literacy, digital
inclusion...?
As discussed in Section 4, one of the project’s biggest limitations
was the diculty of directly engaging publics from vulnerable and
isolated communities to join participants as co-designers. While
there had been hope at the beginning of the project that the last
sessions could be conducted in-person with members of these com-
munities, it soon became clear this would be impossible, meaning
that many of the groups that participants had hoped to co-design
alongside (see Fig.4) would be more unreachable than ever due to
the pandemic exacerbating already-evident inequalities with re-
gards to digital access and inclusion. These unevenly distributed
aordances have traditionally been described using the term ‘digital
divide’. This concept has been criticised, however, for oering an
over-simplication of digital technology usage into a bipolar split
of haves and have-nots, instead of a nuanced gradiation of agency
and marginalisation, which features evolving degrees of access
according to context [
4
,
16
,
59
]. We thus follow the lead of those
who frame digital inclusion as intertwined with socioeconomic de-
velopment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, relying on digital platforms to
explore digital inclusion meant that many of the project’s hoped-for
co-designers had already been faced with multiple barriers to entry
prior to Covid-19 which restricted not only their digital, but also cul-
tural, participation. In London, for example, while museums have
oered free entry since the introduction of universal admission in
2001, public participation remains unevenly distributed according
to age, class and ethnicity, with the world’s most privileged tak-
ing advantage of museum oerings at much higher rates than all
other groups [
7
,
11
,
55
]. Project participant Sandra leads a team
engaged in public programming at the Tate Gallery in London. In a
post-project interview, she discussed a common concern amongst
participants: "How accessible are they [technologies] to people that
would already have diculty engaging with the institution? [...] I
really think that it depends on one’s socioeconomic setting, and the
nancial situation they’re in, and what they have at their disposal.
If they have already an existing relationship with the institution,
then maybe they would have learned new things and new skills
in order to continue that relationship. If it was about maybe ac-
cessing the arts institution for the rst time, during a moment of
lockdown [...] those are harder to reach audiences, because why
would we [the Tate] be a priority? And I think that’s what museums
are having to ask themselves at the moment.” By forcing cultural
heritage providers and producers alike to ‘take everything online’,
the pandemic further exacerbated the prevailing challenges [12].
Project participants working at museums in London and Tokyo
were keenly aware of these contradictions, yet also cited feeling a
lack of agency in knowing where to start when it came to digital
inclusion - a challenge that had drawn many of them to partici-
pate in the rst place. In an attempt to mitigate these concerns,
the project team facilitated ongoing ‘care entanglements’ [
33
] by
inviting an additional cohort of participants from local community
organisations who represented the project’s co-designer publics
in London and Japan, including Flourishing Lives
1
, Slow Label
2
,
1http://ourishinglives.org/ Retrieved February 26, 2021
2https://www.slowlabel.info/en/ Retrieved February 26, 2021
MANSIL Museum Access Network for Sensory Impairments
3
, and
Tate Gallery’s Soapbox
4
. This cohort joined the workshops as guest
speakers, special guests and panelists. Their insights facilitated rich
debates, and laid bare just how closely digital literacy was associ-
ated with the multiple diculties already faced by the pandemic’s
most vulnerable communities.
London participant Lorraine works at Age UK, a charity which
improves the lives of older Londoners. She outlined the access
diculties of her constituents. “A high proportion of our clients
are from 50 plus, with a wide spectrum of issues, long-term health
conditions, loneliness, isolation. And a lot of them are also behind
the digital divide sort of. They’re not even on the radar of that.
Because they don’t have that technology. [...] So if you were a
person that went to the theatre or was able to, or accessed cinema
or art [...] then you would have made an eort to do so [...] but
because everything’s online, it kind of knocks a whole level of
people out. .. because they can’t access that, or don’t have that skill-
set or that condence [...] On a national level, rst of all you have to
get people online. Take away the fear. Give them training.” Tokyo
participants also discussed a lack of digital literacy and training as
ongoing concerns with regards to addressing the needs of an aging
population. Design student Karin reected that: “We [in Japan] are
very behind in IT skills. Everything is, I think, very traditional in
that way,” with elderly individuals often lacking the level of insider
knowledge required to locate available digital literacy programmes
in the rst place.
Insights like these led participants such as Marc, who runs Maker
Assembly and works in digital programming at the Victoria & Al-
bert Museum in London, to reect on the continued value of using
low and at-hand technologies from radios to landlines to engage
with publics in care-full ways, by meeting people where they were
already comfortable. Marc explained: “What really connects people
is the things that we already have, and things that we already know,
and if you think about the barriers to engagement we established
earlier in the conversation, really low-tech is the only way to go
[...] So I think good advice I would give myself is, instead of think-
ing about cool-tech we can showcase, what do we have at home,
and how can we use what we already have. Because you’re not
going to expect your audience to buy an Oculus Rift.” By tackling
digital barriers to entry through creative integrations of everyday
technologies, engagement itself became an ongoing matter of care
that could be applied more thoughtfully.
5.2 The benets of sustainable collaboration,
experimentation and co-learning
Another nding of the project is that there are also benets to
facilitating co-design sprints in online-only settings. As Ekstrom
et al noted in the halcyon days before the pandemic heavily re-
stricted air travel, the “absence of any meaningful alternatives” to
international place-based conferences prior to Covid-19 meant that
“digitally enabled workshops and conferences remain[ed] a rare
phenomenon” in academia [
20
]. The pandemic soon gave Ekstrom
et al exactly the kind of scenario they had wished to see - an entire
3https://mansil.uk/ Retrieved February 26, 2021
4
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/online-event/workshop/soapbox Retrieved Febru-
ary 26, 2021
33
C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seale, WA, USA Kit Braybrooke, Stephanie Janes, and Chihiro Sato
world experimenting with novel approaches to online collaboration.
In the case of London-Tokyo connections, the project’s engagement
with care-full solutions to digital exclusion took on a particular
intimacy precisely because participants were themselves experienc-
ing rst-hand feelings of isolation and vulnerability in association
with the pandemic, as discussed previously. This fostered empathy
and resonance amongst the thinking-with of participants. Their
co-creations across digital platforms illustrate how collaborative
knowledge production can thoughtfully consider the needs of di-
verse worlds, in ways that state “I am not the only one” [18].
One aspect of the sprints that the project team did not anticipate
was the necessity of paying care-full attention to not only the digital
literacies of project publics, but also its participants. While they
cited varying levels of comfort with the digital tools listed in pre-
sprint surveys, it soon became clear that several participants were
experiencing online workshops for the rst time. As a cultural
producer in London explained: “I haven’t joined anything like this
before online [...] to be honest, I remember reading and thinking,
this is so exciting, and this also sounds really scary. Can I do it? [...]
And then the rst session put me immediately at ease and all those
worries that I had going into that rst session totally melted away.
It was about how you [the project team] framed it, and the kind of
welcome everyone received, and the amazing people in that digital
room together, it felt like it will be what we make of it, rather than
what we don’t know.” Another London participant stated: “It was
all new [...] it was my rst actual experience of breakout rooms,
which amused me, because when we had an internal meeting [of
their organisation] they were discovering breakout rooms for the
rst time, and I was just smiling in the background and going, hmm.
Got some way to go.”
By explaining to participants that we would be openly exper-
imenting with creative digital technologies along the way, some
of which worked well (like Miro, for both teams), others less so
(like Slack, in London), the process of co-design also became one
of co-learning. In both London and Tokyo, participants cited the
digital skills they had gained as their most valuable takeaway - and
explained how they would be weaving these learnings into their
institutions, from online teaching for university courses, to commu-
nity dialogues and public events. Daniel, who leads a digital team at
the University of Cambridge Fitzwilliam Museum, had led a variety
of digital programmes across UK museums. In his experience, he
had seen "a lot of people think[ing] they’re doing stu in isolation,
but they’re not. And we’re all scratching around doing the same
thing. [...] And I think seeing your workshop and how it worked
was really useful for me, in saying, we can do this, to the colleagues
who are really scared about doing it internally."
In the Tokyo group, Hiroko, a designer at Panasonic, described
how the co-learning of the sprints had propelled her to think about
the company’s relations dierently: “I’ve been trying out some
workshops online with my former IBM colleagues. It was very good
learning about design thinking [...] that’s something I’m actually
trying to spread out in Panasonic [...] It’s not digital at all. But
Panasonic has a lot of Panasonic shops around Japan. They are
small, mom and dad kind of appliance stores. And they don’t just
sell appliances, but they also do after service. It would be great to
use those shops, and be the centre of community [...] to reach out
to the isolated public [...] They do go to senior citizens’ homes and
x their aircons [...] So they do have a community already. I think it
would be good for Panasonic if they can leverage that." Reections
like these illustrate how the task of improving community access
to digital experiences cannot only fall to cultural and state actors.
Instead, it should be perceived as a responsibility shared across all
levels of society, with digital literacy, equity and inclusion framed
as integral to sustainable development.
6 CONCLUSION
In the wake of national lockdown policies due to the Covid-19 pan-
demic in Tokyo and London, arts and cultural organisations were
faced with overwhelming challenges as they tried to continue to
bring cultural experiences to a variety of publics in their own homes.
In their attempt to generate innovative solutions to this problem,
our adapted design strolls emphasised the importance of consid-
ering the politics and ethics of care, and the relational nature of
knowledge generation in co-design processes. They also highlighted
existing inequities of digital access and inclusion amongst cultural
producers and the isolated and vulnerable publics they sought to
engage, which were further exacerbated by the pandemic.
By applying a care-full approach to our online design strolls, par-
ticipants were encouraged into modes of thinking- and designing-
with rather than ‘for’, despite the fact that cultural producers re-
mained more physically distant from the communities they had
hoped to co-design with — and indeed from each other — than ever
before. The sprints allowed them to at least begin to reconceptualise
their understanding of who these isolated and vulnerable publics
were, and what their needs were, in ways that incorporated their
own experiences of isolation — while remaining aware of the huge
diversity of groups and their experiences that these categories now
encompassed. In doing so, the project was formative fostering new
insights around an important pre-gurative aspect of speculative
ethics of care as cited by Bellacasa: To “broaden consideration of
the lives involved in caring agencies” by asking "what is included in
’our’ world" in ways that view care as "vital in interweaving a web
of life" [
18
]. These encounters shifted the project’s conceptualisa-
tion of care from something abstract to an ongoing series of doings
which are shared by all members of a community, the engagements
of which are reciprocal rather than one-sided.
The prototypes that participants developed as a result of these
experiences were equally diverse and thoughtful, taking both digital
and non-digital formats into account and designing for the most
care-full constellations of each. Several of the participants also
built new, and surprisingly intimate, interpersonal connections
amongst themselves, and with the representatives of isolated and
vulnerable communities who joined the project as guest speakers
and drop-in collaborators, reecting a genuine desire to include a
plurality of ideas and perspectives in future care-full workings. The
project’s exploratory activities across a range of digital platforms
also helped participants build condence in their own digital skills,
and their ability to use and promote those skills within their own
organisations in the service of the communities they had identied.
Signicant challenges were involved in this process, too, espe-
cially in terms of managing group dynamics and digital access, facil-
itating for diverse skill levels, and balancing the care-full approach
with a need for group cohesion and visible outcomes. However,
34
Towards Care-full Design Sprints C&T ’21, June 20–25, 2021, Seale, WA, USA
the response from participants was overwhelmingly positive - and
illustrates great potential for further initiatives.
With these ndings in mind, we oer six design principles for
the eective facilitation of care-full co-design strolls for diverse
participants in limited and/or online-only settings:
(1) Think ‘phygitally’
: Our design strolls did not involve phys-
ical prototyping, which would certainly have been more
challenging. However, using a predominantly online for-
mat for remote sprints does not preclude the use of non-
digital materials or exchanges, which in this case developed
a stronger sense of personal interconnection between two
groups across the world that had been previously missing
from their digitally-mediated interactions.
(2) Agree on collective expectations, together
: The exact
nature of what care-full co-design means will be particular
to each group and their contexts. It thus becomes important
to negotiate, and agree on, acceptable conduct at the start
of the design stroll experience. The collectively owned code
of care, co-created by participants and (ideally) alongside
community members as co-designers, is essential to setting
out the care-full tone of all interactions that follow.
(3) Set a manageable pace - neither marathon nor sprint
:
Faster doesn’t always mean better ideas, and there are ben-
ets to slowing the process down and building in time for
reection, particularly in the early stages of framing the de-
sign challenge and user research. However, bear in mind the
need to balance care-full, adaptable pacing that encourages
longer-term engagement, with the need for group cohesion
and outputs that participants all feel they have had an equal
stake in co-creating.
(4) Be aware of the limitations of your stroll, but don’t
overlook its extra aordances
: There is a temptation to
view an online-only design sprint as a lesser alternative to
in-person models that will inevitably deliver inferior out-
comes. Yet our design strolls suggest there are real benets
to such an approach. In fact, the most important outcomes
of the stroll might not be the prototypes themselves. The in-
timate connections fostered between participants, the digital
literacies developed, and the many moments of co-learning
should not be considered by-products of the design process
but instead valuable, if unexpected, outcomes in their own
right.
(5) Bake concepts of thinking- and becoming-with [18, 24]
throughout the entire co-design process
: This will help
foster relational intimacy amongst diverse groups of par-
ticipants, and between participants and the publics and/or
communities they intend to work with as co-designers, in
ways that nourish inventive congurations.
(6) Set up spaces that encourage casual playing, making
and learning
: Facilitating design sprints online can enable
a friendly atmosphere of shared experimentation, where
participants feel freer than usual to try making-as-learning
across many digital platforms. Participants in the project’s
Tokyo workshops especially felt the process oered a space
in which they could make mistakes, and try again. These
exible, cross-platform experiments might also help mitigate
uneven power dynamics within groups, and help facilitators
oer care-full encouragement.
Modifying the design sprint model to negotiate dierence and
enable ourishing and care-full relations under the dicult circum-
stances of Covid-19 was an incredibly challenging process - and
also deeply rewarding. Our ndings illustrate the great potential
of interventions that ‘make kin’, in the words of Donna Haraway,
by oering a “potent response to devastating events” through ap-
proaches that “rebuild quiet places” [
24
] where thinking-with and
designing-with (and around) dynamics of collective care, wellbeing
and repair is encouraged. The overwhelmingly positive feedback
of the care-full experimentation process reveals there is an appetite
for similar initiatives within the arts and cultural heritage sectors
elsewhere. We hope these ndings will help lay the groundwork for
further iterations, and the development of a more robust framework
for other kinds of care-full design strolls that invite isolated and
vulnerable publics to the table not as subjects, but instead as co-
designers - to think, make, learn and dream new futures alongside.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project was funded by the King’s College London ‘King’s
Together’ Seed Fund and Keio Global Research Institute Pre-Startup
Fund. The authors would like to thank all of the project participants,
guest speakers, and co-designer collaborators for being so generous
with their time, care and energy during such a dicult time. The
authors would specically like to thank Karin Ogino, Kiyoko Itagaki,
Arata Hoshino, and Marisa Sano for their support in conducting
the workshops in Tokyo.
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