Computing and the Common. Hints of a new utopia in Participatory Design

In this statement, I draw upon the need of Participatory Design to engage with new utopias. I point to contemporary critical theories and to concurrent social conditions that make possible to identify the construction of the common as a possible utopia. In conclusion, I suggest that forms of community-based participatory design could be actual practices supporting such utopia.

Democratising design in scientific innovation: application of an open value network to open source hardware design

International audienceOpen source hardware (OSH) development has been gaining momentum in recent years with several communities attempting to formalise its various aspects. One particularly promising area is the design of open source scientific hardware. Previous work has shown that the use of digital fabrication techniques has allowed scientists to make high-quality scientific tools for 1-10% of the cost of commercial proprietary equipment. Open source scientific hardware (and the open science movement in which it is situated) is part of a larger social shift characterised by open production methodologies, and decentralised and distributed models of collaboration. Design is also increasingly involved in supporting open production, both in terms of designing and developing technical infrastructures, and in terms of encouraging and sustaining processes that promote collaboration and openness.This paper builds on the work of open source scientific hardware and emerging concepts in participatory design with a focus on commons-based peer production. How do open production environments foster engagement and innovation? Can distributed modes of production support the design of open source scientific hardware? To answer these questions, a design research case study was undertaken to investigate the design and social impact of a collaboratively designed open source hardware instrument developed by Sensorica, an open value network, in collaboration with an academic laboratory. The project’s goal was to engage with makers and communities around the world in order to encourage its wider adoption, future evolution and continued development

Designing Situated Vocabularies to Counter Social Polarizations: A Case Study of Nolo Neighbourhood, Milan

Many neighbourhoods are currently serving as laboratories where new methods are being explored for collaboratively redesigning cities and tackling the social, environmental, and cultural issues affecting them. These redesign processes are often supported by local communities who increasingly develop bottom-up initiatives to innovate and preserve the neighbourhood’s "common goods." This is certainly the case of Nolo, an area in the city of Milan (Italy) that has recently undergone an urban regeneration process thanks to the presence of a proactive community of actors living and working in the neighbourhood. Despite effective social innovation practices enacted by part of the local community, several "voices" in Nolo - mainly belonging to marginalized communities - are still excluded from the current process of urban regeneration. This lack of attention is rather problematic for the whole community, as it is leading to increasing rather than mitigating social polarization. To address this issue, we approached Nolo and its community through a participatory design experimentation, generating a series of collaborative platforms to enable those marginalized voices - humans as well as non-humans - to be heard, to enter into agonistic conversations with one another, and to question what they (should) all care about. What this (still ongoing) experimentation is currently showing is that to co-design collaborative platforms to counter polarization needs to be carefully balanced, negotiating between all the actors involved and acknowledging their thick entanglements to finally unravel how they radically inter-depend on one another. This kind of "ontologizing" practice is currently proving to be pivotal to counter “antagonisms” (and, therefore, mitigate social polarizations), and re-framing them in "agonistic" terms. This article reports how we operated this “ontologizing” practice in a particularly debated area of the neighbourhood by embracing the perspective of marginalized actors, encouraging them to collaborative and transformative actions for their own situated context

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

A City in Common: A Framework to Orchestrate Large-scale Citizen Engagement around Urban Issues

Citizen sensing is an approach that develops and uses lightweight technologies with local communities to collect, share and act upon data. In doing so it enables them to become more aware of how they can tackle local issues. We report here on the development and uptake of the 'City- Commons Framework for Citizen Sensing', a conceptual model that builds on Participatory Action Research with the aim of playing an integrating role: outlining the processes and mechanisms for ensuring sensing technologies are co-designed by citizens to address their concerns. At the heart of the framework is the idea of a city commons: a pool of community-managed resources. We discuss how the framework was used by communities in Bristol to measure and monitor the problem of damp housing