The DCitizens SIG aims to navigate ethical dimensions in forthcoming Digital Civics projects, ensuring enduring benefits and community resilience. Additionally, it seeks to shape the future landscape of digital civics for ethical and sustainable interventions. As we dive into these interactive processes, a challenge arises of discerning authentic intentions and validating perspectives. This exploration extends to evaluating the sustainability of future interactions and scrutinising biases impacting engaged communities. The commitment is to ensure future outcomes align with genuine community needs and address the ethical imperative of a considerate departure strategy. This dialogue encourages future researchers and practitioners to integrate ethical considerations and community-centric principles, fostering a more sustainable and responsible approach to technology-driven interventions in future urban regeneration and beyond.

Thanks to all that joined us at CHI on the 15th May, more details on the CHI program: https://programs.sigchi.org/chi/2024/program/content/150793

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.

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.

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.

Shaun Lawson

Shaun is Professor of Social Computing and Head of the Department of Computer & Information Sciences at Northumbria University. His research lies at the boundaries between computing, design and the social sciences, and explores the use and significance of social media, and other collaborative and participatory digital services, in people’s lives. This includes a focus on the design, implementation and evaluation of new social platforms, applications and services as well as analysis of text, speech and image data. He was appointed the UK’s first Professor in Social Computing in 2011.

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.

Ana Cristina Pires

Ana Cristina Pires is a Research Fellow at ITI-LARSyS and Co-PI of the “Interaction and Perception” research line at the Center for Fundamental Research in Psychology from the Universidad de La República (Uruguay). Much of her work is dedicated to developing inclusive educational technology to facilitate the acquisition of core cognitive skills, such as executive functions, mathematics, and computational thinking, in children with mixed visual abilities.

Markus Rohde

Markus Rohde studied psychology and sociology at the University of Bonn and is one of the founders of the International Institute for Socio-Informatics (IISI) and co-editor of the International Report on Socio-Informatics (IRSI). His main research interests are human-computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), expertise management and blended learning, virtual organizations, non-governmental organizations and (new) social movements.

Alessio Del Bue

Alessio Del Bue is a tenured senior researcher leading the PAVIS (Pattern Analysis and computer VISion) research line of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova, Italy. Previously, he was a researcher in the Institute for Systems and Robotics at the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Lisbon, Portugal. Before that, he obtained my Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Lourdes Agapito in the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London.His current research interests are related to 3D scene understanding from multi-modal input (images, depth, audio) to support the development of assistive Artificial Intelligence systems.

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.

Event Overview:

Digital Civics projects aim to beyond just implementing technology—it’s about shaping ethical, sustainable, and community-responsive digital interventions. This project involves assessing the roles we take within digital civics projects, the sustainability of future interactions and addressing biases that could impact the communities we aim to serve. 

With this focus, we organised a Special Interest Group (SIG) at CHI 2024 in Hawaii, bringing together 20 participants from across the HCI field. In this session, we discussed the importance of fostering dialogue between researchers, practitioners, and communities to inspire a new generation of Digital Civics that prioritises ethical considerations and community-driven solutions. The SIG contributed to a deeper understanding of how researchers can drive more responsible, sustainable, and impactful technology projects within Digital Civics. 

Building on the SIG’s insights, we submitted a workshop proposal to NordiCHI 2024 focused on participatory design (PD) in Digital Civics. This workshop aims to explore challenges and failures often overlooked in PD projects. Through case studies and group discussions, participants will reflect on how failure is defined and the obstacles encountered and collaborate on solutions. 

A particular focus of the workshop will be on the impact of these challenges on the well-being of researchers and communities, addressing a key need identified during the SIG. By sharing strategies and embracing different perspectives on failure, we aim to foster collective learning, helping to build more resilient, sustainable design practices in Digital Civics. 

This ongoing project is a collaborative effort involving Anna CarterKyle Montague, and Shaun Lawson from the Centre for Digital Citizens, Northumbria University; Reem Talhouk from the School of Design, Northumbria University; Hugo NicolauAna O. Henriques, and Ana Cristina Pires from the DCitizens Project at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa; Markus RohdeSarah Ruller, and Clara Rosa Cardosofrom the DCitizens project at the University of Siegen; Alessio Del Bue from the DCitizens project at the Instituto Italiano di Technologia; and Tiffany Knearem from Google. 

What is the impact?

This project resulted in the ACM publication of a SIG paper at the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, as well as an ACM workshop paper at NordiCHI 2024, the annual Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. We are currently working on follow-up publications focused on the content and methodologies emerging from these discussions and publications. 

  • Anna R. L. Carter, Kyle Montague, Reem Talhouk, Shaun Lawson, Hugo Nicolau, Ana Cristina Pires, Markus Rohde, Alessio Del Bue, and Tiffany Knearem. 2024. DCitizens Roles Unveiled: SIG Navigating Identities in Digital Civics and the Spectrum of Societal Impact. In Extended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 575, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3643981 
  • Clara Rosa Cardoso, Sarah Rüller, Ana O Henriques, Anna R. L. Carter, and Markus Rohde. 2024. “And this is where we fu***d up!” Lessons learned from Participatory Design in Digital Civic Initiatives. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2024 Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI ’24 Adjunct). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 35, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1145/3677045.3685450