When skillful participation becomes design : making clothes together

This dissertation investigates the intersection and fluidity of design, use and participation when participatory design (PD) extends its focus to new forms, spaces and community contexts. Whereas early PD aimed to enable user participation in the design of their workplaces, contemporary PD experiences new challenges by expanding to new contexts. These contexts are, for instance, “makerspaces” for “peer production”, dedicated to placing participants with varying knowledge and skill into dialogue while providing spaces, tools, materials, and guidance. When extending PD to such spaces, the roles of the designer/user become blurred, because over time they move along a spectrum of acts of design and use. I investigated this challenge by creating three exemplary sites for designing and making clothes together. By designing together I refer to enabling the garment user to participate in the design and production process through offering local spaces and means for shared making activities. I blend PD, do-it-yourself, and do-it-together activities with concepts from peer production, to explore how participants (designer and user) with different skills are “making clothes together”. Simultaneously, I sensitize the participants to sustainable alternatives to the global mass-production system in fashion, which is traditionally based on fast, cheap and high-volume production in low-labor-cost countries. I carried out three “research through design” experiments, creating different kinds of peer production makerspace settings in Finland, Germany and Italy. These spaces were distinctive in the social diversity of their participants; themes and engagement methods, and in their focus on clothing. This focus offered the participants a familiar repertoire of technical equipment (e.g. household sewing machines) and was thus beneficial for observing the blurring of roles between designer and user. Each experiment consisted of a series of participatory making workshops, each lasting three to six hours. During a total of about 60 workshops with hundreds of participants, I collected rich materials such as design diary notes, observations, photographs, and audio recordings of qualitative interviews. The experiments posed specific questions that led me to emergent conceptualizations of “stuff” (i.e. tools, materials, spaces) and “skills”. These stuff and skills were analyzed in terms of their evolving interdependence and their relation to participation and the blurring of roles. The dissertation is structured as the presentation of the main findings of four peer-reviewed journal articles and an introductory chapter. I outline five main contributions to extended PD research and practice. First, my research illustrated the fluid spectrum that spans design and use, through interrelating conceptions from literature with a substantial amount of materials documented through practice. Second, through systematic analysis of stuff and skills, the research explored the social and material considerations of design and “infrastructuring”. Third, I documented how the participants’ (designer and user) roles changed and how participation is a development process over time. The participants’ roles changed from categories such as beginner to advanced experts and allowed associations between those with different kinds of material engagements from operating to managing to designing. This was seen, for instance, by participants taking over responsibilities and becoming workshop facilitators; or a local visitor who turned out to be a sewing machine repair expert. Fourth, I propose that in the given context, participation can be understood as skillful acts of use. This perspective helped me recognize and document changes in the participants’ roles and types of participation when framed as acts of use, determined by skills. Finally, the developed categories documented the relation between participation and skill, by highlighting interesting dynamics emerging around skills development, materialized through evolving and changing stuff (i.e. social and material infrastructuring). For example, skilled participants developed or brought their own tools for facilitation. This further elucidated how skills are not static but interrelated, and that specific skills are required and can be developed through different social, material and designerly aspects, attuned to such extended PD contexts. The results, therefore, contribute to extended PD research by adding nuances extracted from practice, to highlight how skillful participation changes over time. This suggests a reconceptualization and broadening of traditional PD or co-design perspectives of roles. For practice, the perspective of framing participation as skillful acts of use allows designers to support participants’ skills (development) during participation. Further, my research identified that a focus on user or designer roles is limiting in such contexts. It advocates designing spaces for infrastructuring, which allow changes in participation and anticipate unexpected use: spaces that nourish skills development and encourage the sharing of responsibilities among very different participants which can potentially be sustained over time

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

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

Digital Transformation in Norwegian Enterprises

This open access book presents a number of case studies on digital transformation in Norway, one of the fore-runners in the digital progress index established by the European Commission in 2020. They explore the process of adoption, diffusion and value generation from digital technologies, and how the use of different digital solutions has enabled Norwegian enterprises to digitally transform their operations and business models. The book starts with an introductory chapter summarizing a vast body of literature in order to synthesize what is already known about digital transformation before exploring the Norwegian context in more detail. Then a series of case studies from the private and public sector in Norway is presented. They document a process perspective which describes the sequence of events during and after adoption of digital solutions, as well as the types of business value that were realized. Through these single studies, the process of digital transformation is illustrated, a number of key findings highlighted, and eventually theoretical and practical recommendations based on these cases emphasized. The book closes with a brief overview of some emerging technologies, and comments on how they are likely to change different sectors. Digital transformation has been one of the priority areas for the Norwegian government over the past years and puts Norwegian enterprises upfront in adopting novel technologies and utilizing them for achieving organizational goals. This experience accumulated over the years makes the Norwegian context a particularly interesting one in understanding how private and public organizations make use of new digital solutions, what lessons can be learnt during the process, and what are some of the key success and failure factors. This way the book is written for practitioners who are currently involved in digital transformation projects in their organizations, researchers of information systems and management, as well as master students in degrees of informatics and technology management

A City in Common: Explorations on Sustained Community Engagement with Bottom-up Civic Technologies

Large technology companies and city councils are increasingly developing smart city programmes: augmenting urban environments with smart and ubiquitous computing devices, to transform how cities are run. At a smaller scale, communities of citizens are appropriating technologies to tackle matters of concern and to effect positive change from the bottom-up. HCI researchers are also deploying civic technology in the wild, sometimes collaborating with these communities, in the pursuit of both scientific and societal impact. However, little is known about how impactful they have been, and the extent to which they have meaningfully engaged communities in the long term. The goal of this PhD is to identify the factors that can guide the design and deployment of engaging, sustainable and impactful civic technology interventions, from the perspective of the communities that they are intended to benefit. Three case studies are presented: an ethnographic study of an existing civic technology, and two design and evaluation studies of novel interventions. A set of themes was derived from the studies that highlight factors that are positively associated to engagement, sustainability and impact. Based on these themes and on experience from deploying interventions, a framework was developed and validated. It comprises six key phases: identification of matters of concern, framing, co-design of community technologies, deployment, orchestration, and evaluation. In line with a new wave of civically engaged HCI and participatory methods, the framework puts people at the heart of socio-technical innovation and technology in the service of the common good by fostering the development of a commons: a pool of community managed resources. Using this approach, the thesis explores how researchers, entrepreneurs, artists, city councils and communities can collaborate to address community issues using digital technologies. It further suggests how citizens can be supported to develop skills that will allow them to appropriate the intervention for their own situated purposes

Eye on Collaborative Creativity : Insights From Multiple-Person Mobile Gaze Tracking in the Context of Collaborative Design

Early Career WorkshopNon peer reviewe