[Air-L] CfP: Reconsidering Design for Civic Engagement and Participation

[Karin Hansson]

Call for Papers

One day Workshop at ECSCW 2017 in Sheffield UK. https://ecscw2017.org.uk/ <https://ecscw2017.org.uk/>
August 28th 2017

Reconsidering Design for Civic Engagement and Participation
https://reconsideringdesign.wordpress.com/ <https://reconsideringdesign.wordpress.com/>

We believe the HCI/CSCW communities need to put more efforts into envisioning new ways of designing for participation; ways that move beyond basic participation toward more manifold forms of inclusion (Le Dantec and Di Salvo, 2013) thereby enabling a means for engaging with power structures and marginalization (Balka, 2006; Beck, 2002; Shapiro, 2005). As such, we cordially invite researchers, designers, activists, technologists and artists that are exploring and/or experimenting with critical design projects, political design, design-for future-use, for and with social movements, alternative ways of living and alternative economies, to envision and generate a comprehensive program of research. The goal of such research program is to investigate emergent design practices that involve both the design of the material, technical artifact and the political movement, social enterprise or grassroots communities committed to enact social change through citizen’s participation. Some of the questions we would like to discuss in this workshop are:

What is the designer’s agency in configuring and infrastructuring civic participation and engagement in society?
How much should the designer be involved in the process of infrastructuring civic participation?
What are the kinds of dilemmas (i.e. technical but most importantly, those associated with designers’ own values, beliefs, ideologies, subjectivities) that emerge when designers develop their practices in order to contribute to citizen’s participation and political action? Designers who are committed to contributing to civic participation; what are they sensitive to?
How do designers’ practices and institutions configure and give shape to online tools for civic engagement and participation?
How can the impact of civic technology design be sustained over time?
This workshop seeks to bring together works that illustrate, analyze and/or critically inquire innovative ways to do design for civic engagement and participation. By innovative ways of doing design, we mean ways that go beyond applying PD methods with the aim to include the user in the development of a computer system or with the goal to reach consensus among the stakeholders inherently involved. We mean ways of doing design that envisage socio-technological interventions that partake in the ongoing constitution of publics or/and communities and put continuously design efforts into infrastructuring present and future civic participation.


The workshop will consider the following topics:

Research-oriented approaches as well as Design-oriented approaches focused on civic engagement and participation. We will consider both participation that aims to change the whole authority establishment (political hacking) and more narrowly-focused participation that nevertheless aims to change society (social entrepreneurship) and civic participation that focuses on improving specific aspects like voting, energy, sustainability, transport infrastructure, etc.
Challenges involved when doing design with the goal of infrastructuring civic participation and specific ways to deal with them in order to contribute to development of resilient participation practices within publics and/or communities. What challenges were observed, in various cases?
Research methods for the study of how designer’s role and design practices get entangled in tools developed for civic engagement, participation and political action.
Learning processes involved in design practices aimed at civic participation, and in particular how they can be scaffold within designing for infrastructuring civic participation?
Empirical or reflective work engaging with self-reflective design practices in HCI and CSCW, digital commons and making publics, the role of political hackers, social activists in configuring and infrastructuring civic participation, participatory policy design, and adversarial design.
Important Dates

May 26 – Deadline for submissions

June 2- Notification of acceptance

Submit your position paper ( 2-4 pages following the ECSCW exploratory papers template <https://ecscw2017.org.uk/papers-and-exploratory-papers/> for Workshops available at https://ecscw2017.org.uk/papers-and-exploratory-papers/ <https://ecscw2017.org.uk/papers-and-exploratory-papers/> ).

Send your submissions to the following email address: tessy at dsv.su.se <mailto:tessy at dsv.su.se>

At least one author of the position paper must attend the workshop. All participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the conference.Position papers accepted and presented at the workshop will be published in the workshop proceedings and will be invited to submit to a special issue edited by the workshop’s organizers. 

Organizers

Teresa Cerratto-Pargman <http://teresacerrattopargman.blogs.dsv.su.se/>, Stockholm University, is an associate professor of HCI, she is interested in the relationship between writing, meaning and technology from socio-cultural and critical perspectives of literacy and tool use. She works with a particular focus on design and emergent participatory and collaborative practices in TEL and Sustainable HCI. She is currently studying how civic participation and democracy are being redefined within a network for political innovation in Latin America.

Cristian Bogdan <https://www.kth.se/en/csc/2.3721/2.18890/people/bogdan-cristian-1.181460>, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, has explored a few grassroots communities that work for the common good in non-political domains, such as amateur radio, Romanian infrastructure activists, electric car enthusiasts and Swedish energy amateurs. He recently became interested in how such grassroots movements can improve government and policy in the respective areas, and how can they indirectly lead to better democracy and participation.

Somya Joshi <http://sustainablelens.org/?p=745>, E-Gov, Stockholm University, is a Senior Lecturer at Stockholm University with expertise in the field of e-participation, e-democracy and e-governance. Her specialisation falls within the applied context of technological innovation, particularly in how it translates into transparency in governance, education, environmental conservation and health services within the developing world.

Hanna Hasselqvist <http://www.designfakulteten.kth.se/doktorander/hanna-hasselqvist>, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Hanna’s research interests are in design processes where interactive systems are created as complement to and amplifiers of other initiatives and activities that involve various stakeholders in understanding and forming sustainable practices. In her work she has explored energy and transportation practices, designed support for amateur energy management in Swedish housing cooperatives and conceptualised collaborations for sustainable transportation.

Karin Hansson <http://www.su.se/profiles/052karhan-1.187018>, Stockholm University, is a researcher at the Department of Computer & Systems Sciences at Stockholm University and The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her research focus is participatory processes online and the social production of data. With a background in art and design, she is also interested in artistic and participatory research methods, engaging participants through speculative design and design fiction. Her latest research project “Work a work”, in collaboration with artists and union activists, explores the ongoing transformation of work relations.