Unfolding participation over time: temporal lenses in participatory design

Participatory design (PD) research has historically strongly focused on the reporting of design events (e.g. workshops and prototyping activities with participants), where issues such as ‘involving users’, including the users’ point of view, and participation as a matter of mutual learning have been in the foreground. The need to further problematise and critically examine participation is nonetheless apparent. This special issue aims to shed light on participation as it unfolds over time during, between and beyond participatory events such as these. Here, we build an overview of existing directions taken by researchers to address the unfolding of participation in IT design over time. We do this by examining existing PD literature and the four contributions to this special issue. We identify two common temporalities in PD, the future-oriented and the project-based, and propose five lenses that may aid researchers in exploring and understanding the temporal dimensions of participation in their projects: the phasic, emergent, retrospective, prospective and longterm lenses. We end with propositions and opportunities for future research directions in PD, highlighting the multi-faceted nature of the temporality of participation

Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and Technology in building a Wireless Community Network

Contemporary innovation in infrastructures is increasingly characterized by a close relationship between experts and lay people. This phenomenon has attracted the attention from a wide range of disciplines, including computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies (S&TS), organization studies and participatory design (PD). Connecting to this broad area of research, the article presents a qualitative case study concerning the building and maintenance of a grassroots, bottom-up information infrastructure in Italy, defined as wireless community network (WCN). Methodologically, the research is based on qualitative interviews with participants to the WCN, ethnographic observations and document analysis. The aim of the article is to understand the alignment between the technical work implied in building this bottom-up infrastructure and the political and cultural frameworks that move people to participate to this project. Relying on the field of science & technology studies, and in particular on the notions of ‘inverse infrastructure’ and ‘research in the wild’, we disclose the WCN’s peculiar innovation trajectory, localized outside conventional spaces of research and development. Overall, the presentation of the qualitative and ethnographic data allows to point out a more general reflection on bottom-up infrastructures and to enrich the academic debate concerning bottom-up infrastructuring work and other similar typologies of collaborative design projects in the domain of infrastructures

Práticas contra-hegemônicas; interação dinâmica entre agonismo, commoning e design estratégico

Today we can see new policies that suggest more participatory models to address societal challenges. The interest in design and different forms of urban labs is also increasing. This includes participatory design (PD) that has moved out of the workplace into the urban territory. In this paper we will argue that the main contribution from PD is to set up processes that can support and critically reflect on local democracy in relation to these challenges. We will look closer into the notions of commoning and agonism, two concepts that both contest the concept of participation and expand what could be required to constitute local democracy. Through a project journey spanning over seven years, we will discuss how these concepts could be used to guide processes of infrastructuring in democratic urban development processes. However, working with them poses several obstacles, including tensions between them as well as with the notion of strategic design. We will argue that in order to introduce them in a strategic design perspective, you need to consider long-term interventions and diverse levels of engagement as well as different phases where agonistic and commoning approaches are alternated with more strategic engagements of developing networks with powerful alliances.Keywords: participatory design, democracy, infrastructuring, agonism, commoning.Hoje podemos ver novas políticas que sugerem modelos mais participativos para enfrentar os desafios da sociedade. O interesse no design e em diferentes formas de laboratórios urbanos também está aumentando. Isto inclui o design participativo (PD) que saiu do local de trabalho e se deslocou para o território urbano. Neste artigo vamos argumentar que a principal contribuição do PD é a criação de processos que podem apoiar e refletir criticamente sobre a democracia local em relação a estes desafios. Aprofundaremos as noções de commoning e agonismo; dois conceitos que tanto contestam o conceito de participação quanto expandem o que poderia ser necessário para a constituição de uma democracia local. Discutiremos, por meio da observação de um projeto de sete anos, como esses conceitos poderiam ser usados para orientar os processos de infraestruturação em processos democráticos de desenvolvimento urbano. No entanto, eles trazem consigo vários obstáculos, entre as quais as tensões entre eles, bem como com a noção de design estratégico. Sustentaremos que, para que eles sejam introduzidos em uma perspectiva de design estratégico, torna-se necessário considerar intervenções de longo prazo e diversos níveis de envolvimento, bem como diferentes fases onde abordagens agonistas e de commoning se alternam com os compromissos mais estratégicos da construção de redes com alianças poderosas.Palavras-chave: design participativo, democracia, infraestruturação, agonismo, commoning

INFRASTRUCTURING IN THE FUTURE SCHOOL CASE - INVOLVING BOTH ADULTS AND CHILDREN

Information infrastructure building efforts have entered both research literature and the practice of utilizing information and communication technology (ICT) in organizations as well as in our everyday life. The concept of infrastructuring has also challenged the traditional, project-based assumptions of information systems (IS) development. This study will explore infrastructuring within the educational network of a Finnish city. The study examines infrastructuring in-depth in a novel context, and includes an unusual group of participants: children that have so far been almost entirely neglected in IS research. A research framework of nexus analysis, combining both qualitative and participatory research approaches, was utilized for exploring infrastructuring in this Future School case. The study characterizes a multitude of actors, both adults and children, their various activities, and the versatility of outcomes involved. This study addresses both ˜design for use before use´ and ˜design in use´ carried out by teachers and pupils. In addition, the existence of certain kinds of resonance and design-for-design-in-use activities is revealed. The study expands infrastructuring to concern both pedagogical, architectural, and interior design, as well as enabling issus; the study reveals that when creating novel learning environments, all these aspects may play a role together with ICT. \ \ Keywords: Infrastructuring, Information Infrastructure, Participation, Children

Participatory design and “democratizing innovation”

We sketch an alternative “ddemocratizing innovation”” practice more in line with the original visions of participatory design based on our experience of running Malmö Living Labs - an open innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and ideas evolve from bottom-up long--term collaborations amongst diverse stakeholders.

DDoS: From Activist Event to Perpetual Crisis

This paper focuses on recent changes in the way Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are technically administered in order to reassess their role as an activist tactic. By contextualising current forms of attacks within the history of hacktivism, it is possible to discern a shift from DDoS as short-lived event to an enduring phenomenon. The paper discusses the implications of this temporal shift, in terms of a growing reliance on DDoS protection providers and increasingly opaque traffic flows that are managed by these new intermediaries. This discussion then extends towards infrastructure studies in order to question established notions about the relationship between breakdown and visibility. The paper concludes by calling for a stronger engagement with different temporal aspects of recurring communication crises in general and DDoS attacks in particular

Writing PD: accounting for socially-engaged research

As participants in participatory process, PD academics report on the practices and outcomes of their work and thereby shape what is known of individual projects and the wider field of participatory design. At present, there is a dominant form for this reporting, led by academic publishing models. Yet, the politics of describing others has received little discussion. Our field brings diverging sensibilities to co-design, conducting experiments and asking what participation means in different contexts. How do we match this ingenuity in designing with ingenuity of reporting? Should designers, researchers and other participants all be writing up participatory work, using more novel and tailored approaches? Should we write more open and playful collaborative texts? Within some academic discourse, considerable value is placed on reflexivity, positionality, inclusivity and auto-ethnography as part of reflecting. Yet, PD spends no time in discussing its written outputs. Drawing on the results of a PDC’16 workshop, I encourage us to challenge this silence and discuss “Writing PD”

Infrastructuring for cultural commons

In this doctoral dissertation, I inquire into the ways in which Participatory Design (PD) and digital design endeavors can contribute to wider public access to, and use of, digital cultural heritage. I advocate for an approach according to which digital cultural heritage is arranged and understood as cultural commons, and for more collaborative modes of social care for and governance of the commons. In addition to the empirically grounded findings and proposals contained in six individual research articles, I develop a theoretical framework that combines scholarship on Information Infrastructures, Commons and PD. Against this framework I interrogate how the information infrastructures and conditions that surround digital cultural heritage can be active in constructing and contributing to cultural commons. While doing this, I draw attention to the gap that exists between on the one hand official institutional digital cultural heritage collections, systems and practices, and on the other hand the digital platforms and practices through which everyday people create, curate and share digital cultural works. In order to understand how to critically and productively bridge this gap, I present insights gained from conducting three design research cases that engage both cultural heritage institutions and everyday media users. Building upon this empirical work, and latching on to scholarship on the notion of infrastructuring, I propose four infrastructuring strategies for cultural commons: probing and building upon the installed base, stimulating and simulating design and use through gateways, producing and pooling shared resources, and, lastly, fostering and shaping a commons culture that supports commoning. In exploring these strategies, I map the territory between commons and infrastructuring, and connect these notions to the PD tradition. I do so to sketch the design principles for a design orientation, commons design. I assert that these principles can be useful for advancing PD, and can inform future initiatives, aid in identifying infrastructural challenges, and in finding and confirming an orientation to participatory design activities. Drawing on my practical design work, I discuss requirements for professional designers operating on commons frameworks and with collective action. By doing this, my dissertation not only breaks new theoretical ground through advancing theoretical considerations relevant to contemporary design research, especially the field of PD, but also contributes practical implications useful for professional digital media design practice, especially for designers working in the fields of digital culture and cultural heritage

How Teachers Participate in the Infrastructuring of an Educational Network

The evolution of Digital technologies has changed the ways in which people interact with and through technologies. Despite longstanding investment in technical and pedagogical infrastructure, schools vary greatly in the degree to which they have digitalized. New curricula in Finland have put additional pressure on education to meet the goals set for learning in the 21st century. In information systems (IS) research, digitalization increases an interest for understanding contemporary IS projects as infrastructuring. In this study, we examine how teachers as influential actors in transforming their environment participated in shaping the infrastructuring of the educational network of a Finnish city. A nexus analysis of teachers’ interviews revealed three main discourses. The first discourse depicted teachers balancing between traditional and new educational solutions when aligning their pedagogy-driven practices with curriculum objectives. The second discourse concerned infrastructuring activities for establishing pedagogical ICT use successfully. The third discourse highlighted practices that teachers used to share resources as an organizational-balancing effort. The results reveal tensions between collegiality and leadership, submissive and empowered agency, and discontinuities and anticipation in ensuring continuity in infrastructuring. We discuss implications for organizing in-service training and developing local practices as contributing to infrastructuring in the educational network