We are delighted to be hosting a workshop at the Participatory Design Conference in Malaysia, on the 12th August 2024.
Participatory design initiatives, especially within the realm of digital civics, are often integrated and codeveloped with the very citizens and communities they intend to assist. Digital civics research aims to create positive social change using a variety of digital technologies. These research projects commonly adopt various embedded processes, such as commissioning models. Despite the adoption of this process within a range of domains, there isn’t currently a framework for best practices and accountability procedures to ensure we engage with citizens ethically and ensure the sustainability of our projects. This workshop aims to provide a space to start collaboratively constructing a dynamic framework of best practices, laying the groundwork for the future of sustainable embedded research processes. The overarching goal is to foster discussions and share insights that contribute to developing effective practices, ensuring the longevity and impact of participatory digital civics projects.
Participants will be asked to submit a short expression of interest paragraph as to why they are interested in attending the workshop (maximum 300 words).
Please email your submission to Anna Carter at: Anna.r.l.carter@northumbria.ac.uk prior to the 26th July with the following subject line:
‘Envisioning Collaborative Futures: PDC 2024’
Organisers
Anna R L Carter
Anna Carter is a Research Fellow at Northumbria University she has extensive experience in designing technologies for local council regeneration programs, her work focuses on creating accessible digital experiences in a variety of contexts using human-centred methods and participatory design. She works on building Digital Civics research capacities of early career researchers as part of the EU funded DCitizens Programme and on digital civics, outdoor spaces and sense of place as part of the EPSRC funded Centre for Digital Citizens.
Ana O Henriques
Ana O Henriques is currently a junior researcher at the Interactive Technologies Institute / LARSyS, at the University of Lisbon. Ana has focused their research at the intersections of ethics, feminist HCI and digital civics. They are developing the concept of community-led ethics as a process of feminist ethical frameworking for digital civics in the context of the DCitizens project.
Ceylan Besevli
Ceylan is a Design Researcher and Research Fellow at the MSD group, where she focuses on the Smell Care (I-smell) Project, conducting research that delves into digital smell training. She investigates people’s reasons, opinions, and motivations for engagement over time to shed light on the future of digital smell training and fostering a culture around smell care. She also works with design futuring, participatory design, and in-the-wild user research methods.
Sarah Rüller
Sarah Rüller is a research associate at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 – Media of Cooperation and PhD candidate at the Chair of Information Systems and New Media, University of Siegen. Her interests lie broadly in ethnography in HCI, participatory action research, speculative design, and emerging technologies in non-urban areas. Sarah’s current research addresses social media censorship in the context of Palestine and Israel.
Kyle Montague
Kyle Montague is an Associate Professor at Northumbria University and leads the NorSC Research Group. His research spans a breadth of topics and domains with the unifying vision – to address critical social problems and challenges by designing and configuring digital technologies that empower individuals and marginalised communities. More specifically, his work seeks to democratise access to the tools and processes by which we provision technologies and services that shape society.
Hugo Nicolau
Hugo Nicolau is an Associate Professor in the University of Lisbon and researcher at the Interactive Technologies Institute / LARSyS. His research interests include HCI and Accessibility, focusing on the design, build, and study of computing technologies that enable positive social change. His work cuts across multiple technologies from mobile and IoT to social robots and artificial intelligence. His research methods extend mostly from the discipline of HCI and are informed by perspectives in Design Justice, Psychology, Sociology, and Disability Studies. Hugo is broadly interested in research that tackles ambitious interdisciplinary problems.
Firaz Peer
Dr Firaz Peer, is an Assistant Professor of Information Communication Technology in University of Kentucky’s School of Information Science. They study issues of accountability, justice, care, and equity that manifest when building, using and maintaining algorithmic and data infrastructures for marginalized communities – by combining participatory and design based research methods with scholarship from Human-Computer Interaction and Science & Technology Studies.
Reem Talhouk
Reem Talhouk is an Assistant Professor in the School of Design and Centre for International Development at Northumbria University. She is also the co-lead of the Design Feminisms Research Group that aims to explore the plurality of feminist research and design. Her research has explored ways through which participatory design and its outputs may generate decolonial counter-narratives within the humanitarian and global development technological space. She has led research, workshops and SIGs focused on Technology, Design and Migration.
Tiffany Knearem
Tiffany Knearem is a UXR at Google on the Material Design team. She is interested in AI applications for design tooling to support product designer-developer collaboration and unlock creativity. For her PhD her primary research focus was on understanding and enabling community innovation through information and communication technologies, with a dissertation focus on community-based care during COVID-19.
Clara Crivellaro
Clara is a Reader in Digital social justice at the School of Computing’s Open Lab, with expertise in Human-Computer Interaction, Digital Civics, Human-Centre Design, Participatory Design, and co-creation. My research explores how the careful design of new and emergent technologies and socio-technical processes can help support democratic practices and advance equity and social justice in digital societies.
Workshop Overview:
Participatory design initiatives, particularly in the field of digital civics, are often co-developed with the citizens and communities they aim to assist. Digital civics research seeks to create positive social change through various digital technologies and typically employs embedded processes, such as commissioning models. However, despite the widespread adoption of these processes across different domains, there is currently no established framework for best practices and accountability procedures to ensure ethical engagement with citizens and the sustainability of our projects.
Workshop at Participatory Design Conference, Malaysia 2024.
To address this gap, we submitted a workshop proposal to PDC 2024 in Sarawak, Malaysia, aimed at providing a collaborative space for participants to construct a dynamic framework of best practices. This workshop lays the groundwork for the future of sustainable embedded research processes, with the overarching goal of fostering discussions and sharing insights that contribute to the development of effective practices, ensuring the longevity and impact of participatory digital civics projects.
This ongoing project is a collaborative effort involving Anna Carter and Kyle Montague, from the DCitizens project and Centre for Digital Citizens, Northumbria University; Reem Talhouk from the School of Design, Northumbria University; Hugo Nicolauand Ana O. Henriques from the DCitizens Project at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa; Tiffany Knearem from Google; Ceylan Besevli from University College London; Firaz Peer from the University of Kentucky; Clara Crivellaro from the Centre for Digital Citizens, Open Lab, Newcastle University; and Sarah Ruller from the DCitizens project at the University of Siegen.
What’s the impact?
This project resulted in the ACM publication of a workshop paper at PDC 2024, the bi-annual Participatory Design Conference in Sarawak, Malaysia. We are currently working on follow-up publications focused on the content and methodologies emerging from these discussions and publications.
Anna R. L. Carter, Ana O. Henriques, Hugo Nicolau, Kyle Montague, Reem Talhouk, Tiffany Knearem, Ceylan Besevli, Firaz Peer, Clara Crivellaro, and Sarah Ruller. 2024. Envisioning Collaborative Futures: Advancing the Frontiers of Embedded Research. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2024: Exploratory Papers and Workshops – Volume 2 (PDC ’24), Vol. 2. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 190–193. https://doi.org/10.1145/3661455.3669890
