Seeking togetherness: moving toward a comparative evaluation framework in an interdisciplinary DIY networking project

There is renewed interest in community networks as a mechanism for local neighbourhoods to find their voice and maintain local ownership of knowledge. In a post-Snowden, big data, age of austerity there is both widespread questioning of what happens to public generated data shared over ‘free’ services such as Facebook, and also a renewed focus on self-provisioning where there are gaps in digital service provision. In this paper we introduce an EU funded collaborative project (‘MAZI’) that is exploring how Do-It-Yourself approaches to building community networks might foster social cohesion, knowledge sharing and sustainable living through four pilots across Europe. A key challenge is to develop a shared evaluation approach that will allow us to make sense of what we are learning across highly diverse local situations and disciplinary approaches. In this paper we describe our initial approaches and the challenges we face

Implications of Synchronous IVR Radio on Syrian Refugee Health and Community Dynamics

With 1,033,513 Syrian refugees adding a strain on the Lebanese healthcare system, innovation is key to improving access to healthcare. Our previous work identified the potential for technology to improve access to antenatal care services and increase refugee agency. Using (1) paper mock ups and a mobile based prototype, (2) process mapping, (3) focus groups and interviews and (4) key informant meetings, we explored the concept of refugee led community radio shows to deliver peer-led healthcare. We observed the influence of community radio shows on Syrian refugee health education, community dynamics and community agency in relationships between healthcare providers and refugees. Refugees were positively impacted through situating the technology within the community. We highlight issues around trust, agency, understanding, sel-forganization and privacy that resulted from running the shows through mock ups and a mobile based prototype. Our findings inform future work in community run radio shows

Design for existential crisis in the anthropocene age

What should be our orientation to the socio-technical as climate predictions worsen; ecological crises and wars escalate mass migration and refugee numbers; right-wing populism sweeps through politics; automation threatens workers' jobs and austerity policies destabilize society? What is to be done when it is not "business as usual" and even broken concepts of progress seem no longer to be progressing? We ask how to design for the common good, focusing on human needs for meaning, fulfillment, dignity and decency, qualities which technology struggles to support but can easily undermine. We juxtapose the design of computing that offers hope with that which offers only distraction, propose four modes to design for (being attentive, critical, different and in it together) and conclude with a plea to avoid tools that encourage a blinkered existence at a time of great uncertainty and change

Creating a Datascape: a game to support communities in using open data

Open data is a resource that both local governments and citizens can use for answering questions about a particular community and for innovating new products and services. In reality, there are a number of barriers to the use of open data, not least that citizens can find it difficult to make sense of available data and understand what sort of problems it may solve. In this paper we describe the development of a board game that is designed to help people to better understand the relationship between data, the environment from which it derives and the questions it can be used to answer. We describe the motivation for the game’s development, its current design and our ultimate intention, to create a tangible interactive, datascape. This work has been undertaken as part of a smart city educational programme

Expanding the Design Space of ICT for Participatory Budgeting

International audienceThis paper analyzes existing practices and supporting technologies for Participatory Budgeting (PB), with a special focus on US-related initiatives, as a mean to understand the current and future design space of ICT for participatory democracy. We suggest new design opportunities for ICT to facilitate citizen collaboration in the PB process, and by extension, to reflect on how these technologies could better foster deliberative decision-making at a scale that is both small and large

Bottom-up visions for future of food growing in cities

We report on community food growing as an instance of practice-based sustainability research focused on the design of interactive systems for food growing in future cities. We present a case study with a series of workshops using speculative and participatory design approaches focused on creatively exploring futures of urban food growing with a local neighbourhood community. Working with local grassroots communities is often perceived as more egalitarian for promoting viable long-term and embedded change in cities, yet little work has studied this approach for urban food growing. To explore how we might better articulate and conceptualize collaborative food growing futures, we discuss the creation of bottom-up visions as contestations to hegemonic narratives of power and control in cities. These are affected by, limitations of present resources and infrastructures, inability to work at scale due to lack of buy-in of stakeholders, and erroneous promises of future technologies. Through these reflections on grassroots futures as complex assemblages of social and material realities, we provoke researchers and practitioners to look at envisioning future possibilities with participants, as a web of practices and stakeholders. We further suggest that researchers and practitioners explore these interconnections through assemblages of socio-material realities and visions of high- and low-tech futures. This work is important because it provides a new approach to looking at the design of future technologies for cities and addressing systemic issues of hegemonic food systems through bottom-up actionable futures