Making public things: how HCI design can express matters of concern (original) (raw)

Tensing the Present: An Annotated Anthology of Design Techniques to Inquire into Public Issues

Diseña, 2019

The essay tries to unfold the specificities of some design approaches developed at the SciencesPo médialab. Instead of proposing a generalizable set of methods, this experiential account is a tentative systematization of some techniques that have been tested in the lab. Describing them is like annotating an anthology of thoughts and experiments that revolve around the questions of the ‘public’and its ‘issues’. The techniques are aimed at exploring the social, technical and political issues, collecting their traces, their descriptions and their partial stories, bringing them into a space where they can be questioned. The different techniques are aligned into two epistemic movements, complementing, supporting and expanding the digital methods traditionally used in the lab. The first movement tries to produce a localized representation of the issue. The second one invites the public to get as close as possible to it.

" Matters of Concern " as Design Opportunities

Public design can be understood as a perspective that follows democratic approaches to design, addresses collective conditions, and supports the formation of publics. In this paper, we present our efforts to engage with a public design perspective in a case study addressing the topic of dyslexia. The paper contributes to the understanding of the process of articulation of matters of concern in public design. In addition, the results can be considered as opportunities for design that can serve as inspiration for other projects addressing the topic of dyslexia.

A tale of two publics: Democratizing design at the margins

2010

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.

Supporting Social Movements Through HCI and Design

Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2023

The use of digital technologies in grassroots community organizing has multifaceted implications. It has extended the scope of sharing information and experiences, building solidarities and coordination, and fostering common identities to enable participation and amplify the voice of diverse actors in social movements. However, the rise of surveillance technologies, computational propaganda and internet shutdowns are creating novel barriers to democratic action, particularly affecting the participatory parity of marginalized grassroots groups. This one-day hybrid workshop will invite conversations on the complex interrelation between ICTs and social movements and devise ways to support grassroots movements by bringing together HCI researchers, activists and designers. We invite formal position papers to participate in workshop and encourage participants to ideate and contribute to creating zines that can serve as a helpful resource for supporting grassroots movements. ACM Citation: Adrian Petterson, Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat, Paridhi Gupta, Shamika Klassen, Margaret C Jack, Jun Liu, and Priyank Chandra. 2023. Supporting Social Movements Through HCI and Design. In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 364, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3573812

The Politics of Participation in Interaction Design

In response to market needs, researchers and designers in Interaction Design are experimenting new ways of enabling user participation in information systems development. However, the same conceptualization of the participant as a user already reduces his possibility of participation. The user are not capable of designing, so there is a need for experts that can translate their needs into design definitions. Even though participatory design exercises involving users are being promoted, the goal is not to autonomize participants to their own new technology development, but instead to generate user representations in order to improve targeting new products. It´s an abstract inclusion and concrete exclusion, that legitimates technological dependence of a particular social group. Participatory Design as in the scandinavian tradition proposes that this perverse logic should be questioned in the design process, with the goal of generating alternatives that really promote participant´s social development. This participatory approach can lead Interaction Design beyond the microstructures of interaction: interfaces, technics, tasks and other intrinsic details that don´t comprehend the cultural density of the process.

Bridging the Gap Between Politics and Techniques: On the next practices of participatory design

This paper discusses how we in the participatory design (PD) research community may contribute to the evolution of ICT design 1 practices into something that is much more attuned to people using ICT and to their interests. The main idea is that to do so we need to focus more on issues in the gap between politics and techniques, e.g., project funding, types of users and of use settings, the role of companies and of Intellectual Property Rights and the types of projects we work on. The paper presents material illustrating that important changes are going on in the dimensions outlined by these issues and argues that these changes create important, new opportunities for PD to contribute to the 'next practices' of ICT design-as well as serious problems. Thus to exploit these new opportunities we need to improve our understanding of the issues involved and to develop new ways of taking them into account when we design and do research projects.

CITIZENS, TECHNOLOGIES & POWER – A UNIQUE PARTICIPATORY DESIGN CHALLENGE

2017

This paper discusses power relations (Arendt 1970) between citizens and technologies induced by new communication structures for self-organization within a participatory design project: the " Mit-Mach-Stadt Brandis” (“Participatory City”). It questions how citizens use and adapt new digital means that have the potential to strengthen local and social structures. Referring to Latour’s actor network theory (ANT) and the equation of power between human and non-human actors, the current inquiry addresses the impact of digital technologies on citizens. According to Latour, citizens, categorized as human actors, lose power in a digitized and connected urban environment. To counter this tendency, we develop socio-material infrastructures (Star, Ruhleder 1996, Ehn 2008) with and for citizens. Thereby, an empowered position for dealing with increasing digitization should come within the citizens’ reach. We analyze the relation between citizens and technologies before, during, and after the project duration (cf. Ehn 2009:55). This paper is aimed at supporting design researchers in tackling the challenges of increased digitization and the possibilities of civic empowerment in participatory design work.

Designing with Publics that Are Already Busy: A Case from Denmark

Design Issues

Design research has recently turned the attention to how designers contribute to the organization of publics when designing objects. This also raises the question of what kind of “good” public is being pursued. In this article, we argue for the importance of taking pre-existing normative projects into account to avoid approaching publics as yet another instantiation of “users” of design objects. We develop the argument by discussing our recent attempt at designing an online data visualization tool for public use. Instead of inviting potential future users of our tool to a design workshop, we decided to adopt an ethnographic interest in the existing “goods” that guided the publics for which we wanted to design. Based on explorations of three sites, we found our publics to be already busy with concerns that were both highly relevant to the data practices we were trying to facilitate, while at the same time overflowing and provoking our framing of the publics we were attempting to enga...