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.

INNOVATING SCIENCE: OPEN ACCESS AND THE SITUATED FIELD OF PHYSICS

In the recent academic debate about Internet-related technologies, in particular web-based ones, these technologies have been conceptualised as a means to democratise innovation, or foster a new and innovative form of organization. In the face of this hype on the transformational role of the Internet and the Web, a suitable dose of academic scepticism requires an empirical discussion on whether it is appropriate to consider the Web and the Internet as able to bring about such radical innovation in organizations. Other IS scholars pointed out that, in the social debate about technologies, we can find the presence of computopian and computropian views, the former giving technology a full positive role, the latter one rejecting it in favour of a negative perspective. Unlike these exaggerated standpoints, an argument that considers Web technologies as a phenomenon, as suggested by Ciborra, can lead to a deeper and more balanced insight into the relationship between the Web and innovation processes. In our study, we try to understand the situated practices that lead scientists to endorse the Open Access way of publication, going back to the origin of the web with High Energy Physicists, trying to demonstrate that in this field it is not possible to reduce everything to universalistic claims

PIE News. A public design project toward commonfare

The new poor are a group of people composed by precarious workers, working poor, NEETs, and people left behind by the safety nets, accounting for approximately 25% of the European population. Commonfare is a new collaborative form of welfare provision based on equitable governance and grassroots democracy, entailing the involvement of diverse stakeholders to facilitate the bottom-up emergence of collective practices tackling the needs of the new poor. The paper mainly describes the concepts and building blocks of the PIE News project, a public design project which started in July 2016 with the aim to foster the emergence of commonfare as an alternative model to satisfy the needs of the new poor. PIE news leverages on 3 pilots (Italy, Croatia, Netherlands) with grassroots organizations in order to create a commonfare model through the development of a Collective Awareness Platform and a Digital Currency tool. The network supporting the project is constituted by organizations that account for approximately one-hundred thousand social media contacts. These organizations include ethical banking, networks of associations, activists for basic income, and many others. Finally, the paper briefly presents some results of the project at one year from its start

Participatory Design and Critical Media Studies:A Convivial Conversation

Nell'era della società delle piattaforme, i Critical Media Studies si trovano di fronte alla sfida di sviluppare non solo proposte teoriche in grado di affrontare criticamente il potere esercitato sulla società dalle piattaforme digitali di proprietà della GAFAM, ma anche di immaginare una prassi capace di cambiare l'economia politica di questo ecosistema mediatico digitale guidato dalle aziende. Per fare questo, crediamo che il Participatory Design e i Critical Media Studies debbano dialogare quando si tratta di quadri teorici e pratiche di intervento. In questo articolo proponiamo di iniziare questo dialogo partendo dal lavoro di Ivan Illich, in particolare dal suo libro Tools for Conviviality. Riteniamo che per immaginare un possibile processo di progettazione dei media digitali in grado di evitare la creazione di monopoli radicali, sia necessario adottare un approccio di Convivial Participatory Design in cui le questioni relative alla scala, ai bisogni delle persone e alle disuguaglianze di potere siano considerate dai designer in collaborazione con gli utenti.In the age of platform society, Critical Media Studies are faced with the challenge of developing not only theoretical proposals capable of critically addressing the power exerted on society by GAFAM-owned digital platforms, but also of envisioning a praxis capable of changing the political economy of this corporate-driven digital media ecosystem. To do this, we believe that Participatory Design and Critical Media Studies should dialogue when it comes to theoretical frameworks and intervention practices. In this paper we propose to start this dialogue building upon the work of Ivan Illich, especially his book Tools for Conviviality. We find that in order to imagine a possible digital media design process able to avoid the creation of radical monopolies, it is necessary to adopt a Convivial Participatory Design approach where issues related to scale, people needs and power inequalities are considered by designers in collaboration with the users

People’s Republic of Bolzano or how digital artifacts can be adversarial to misinformation

Design scholars have been focusing more of their attention to public controversial “things”, through the focus on “making public things” or on the “formation of publics” in relation to design projects. With this in mind, this paper describes a design case contrasting and challenging the main media narrative through the production of digital artifacts. The design intervention we describe, aimed at counteracting the racist stereotyping which targets the local Chinese community of Bolzano. The project People’s Republic of Bolzano reshapes the identity of the local Chinese community through digital media, in order to restore more transparent and balanced information, allowing a broader audience to inform itself on such a complex and multifaceted issue. This small project is part of an emergent phenomenon to counterbalance misrepresentation, in this case over the issue of migration

Co-designing for common values:creating hybrid spaces to nurture autonomous cooperation

This paper concerns the development of digitally-mediated technologies that value social cooperation as a common good rather than as a source of revenue and accumulation. The paper discusses the activities that shaped a European participatory design project which aims to develop a digital space that promotes and facilitates the ‘Commonfare’, a complementary approach to social welfare. The paper provides and discusses concrete examples of design artifacts to address a key question about the role of co- and participatory design in developing hybrid spaces that nurture sharing and autonomous cooperation: how can co-design practices promote alternatives to the commodification of digitally-mediated cooperation? The paper argues for a need to focus on relational, social, political and ethical values, and highlights the potential power of co- and participatory design processes to achieve this. In summary, the paper proposes that only by re-asserting the centrality of shared values and capacities, rather than individual needs or problems, co-design can reposition itself thereby encouraging autonomous cooperation