[Air-L] CfP: Repositioning CoDesign in the age of platform capitalism: from sharing to caring

[Maurizio]

Dear all

I share this call for paper related to a CoDesign special issue I am
co-editing with Gabriela Avram, Jaz Choi, Stefano De Paoli, Ann Light, and
Peter Lyle.

I am sure it will be of interest for some.

Apologies for cross-posting

Best

Maurizio

---

Special Issue

Repositioning CoDesign in the age of platform capitalism: from sharing to
caring

Please visit:
http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/est/jmi02301-nsdn-si-sept-2017/
Guest Editors

Gabriela Avram, University of Limerick

Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Queensland University of Technology

Stefano De Paoli, Abertay University

Ann Light, University of Sussex

Peter Lyle, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute

Maurizio Teli, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute
Scope

In this special issue
<http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/est/jmi02301-nsdn-si-sept-2017/>, we
are calling for contributions which discuss how co-design is positioning
itself in the age of  “platform capitalism” (Snricek, 2016). We are looking
for both theoretical reflections on the position of co-design and empirical
cases of co-design which can shed better light on these dynamics.

Digital platforms, often labelled as part of the ”sharing economy”, are
becoming increasingly relevant to both the daily lives of private
individuals and to the direction and operation of social and political
systems. As these tools transform various communities (of interest, place,
practice, and circumstance) to establish new forms of connection, welfare,
labour, and service, there emerge fundamental questions around the perils
of their design and use and the possibilities for thinking about fair
alternatives.

Two narratives on the sharing economy tend to dominate the current
discourse. One group of accounts focuses on social innovation, creating
more sustainable economic and environmental models in which sharing access
to goods and services allows for a more efficient and sustainable
utilisation of resources. The second group centres on the idea of
market-focused digital innovation radically changing business models and
generating economic activity, often threatening the working conditions of
other social groups (e.g. Uber and the taxi drivers) or the texture of
local communities (e.g. the effect of AirBnB on the rental market) .

In both cases, a prominent role is played by platforms that seek to
quantify collaborations for purposes of profit, labelled as platform
capitalism by Snricek (2016). For example, likes and other emoticon-based
responses to a Facebook post are often used as quantitative measure of the
post's impact and success of engagement. Through algorithmic filtering,
these become the measure of our affective, political, and cultural
identities and guides for further design of our experiences on the
platform. In fact, digital platforms are in essence connective and
collaborative, creating a digital action point where multiple networks
meet. These qualities have been enhanced through the development of on-site
collaborative features. However, with the impact of venture capital in the
market and increasingly driven by financial motives, many platforms have
been adjusting their algorithms in order to commodify collaboration. Hence,
novel forms of exploitation (of social relations as well as labour) have
been established (van Dijck, 2013).

Co-design, as well as other related domains of research and practice, such
as Participatory Design and Computer Supported Cooperative Work, starts
from a perspective where collaboration is valued for both its politics and
what it can deliver, for instance, supporting emancipation of workers from
the capitalist production process (Ehn, 1989). These approaches stress the
importance of collaborative design and production of technologies, places,
and services with a hopeful speculation that designing collaboratively will
increase the impact and use value of the designed things and the quality of
life for the people using them, in what is called “design for future use”
(Ehn, 2008). It thus become relevant to ask how these approaches position
themselves with regard to the challenges posed by platform capitalism,
associated with commodification and quantification of collaboration.

A possible direction could be placing  attention on the commons (Ostrom,
1990; Hess and Ostrom, 2007) as collectively managed and shared resources,
or the common (Hardt and Negri, 2009; Dardot and Laval, 2014) as the
ensemble of the material and symbolic resources tieing together human
beings. These concepts may be indeed central for the positioning of
co-design and participatory design in the age of platform capitalism,
especially for connecting with the original emancipatory intent of these
design and research practices (Teli et al., 2017).  Another direction may
be the relationship that exists between the subjects involved in
co-designing, and the object of the action. When this relationship
manifests itself as structuring social relations, these relations can be
referred to as a kind of care (Light and Akama, 2014). With this
perspective, highly networked economic relations could leave behind the
misleading narratives on the “sharing economy” promoted by platform
capitalism, and engage in structuring a caring economy, oriented toward
nurturing respectful and ever-transforming collaboration (Mol, Moser and
Pols, 2010).

The tension between commodification of collaboration and collaboration as
productive in itself, considered as a basis for design and production,
offers fertile ground to scholars, practitioners, and activists interested
in co-designing practices of care for the common/s on different aspects.
Possible directions may include be:

What role could co-design play in establishing new and different
commons-based forms of economic activities and systems?

Theoretical relations between co-design and commons-based peer production

Empirical cases of co-design in the context of commons-based peer production


How does the collaborative character of co-design interrelate with the
commodification of digital social relations?

Critical analysis of co-design in the context of platform capitalism

Co-design and commons-based peer production as forms of activism

How might co-design be interrogated, redefined, and evaluated as a means to
encourage care and social collaboration?

Theoretical elaboration of criteria for evaluation of co-design activities
promoting social collaboration

Empirical discussions of evaluation of co-design activities promoting
social collaboration

Timeline

22nd December 2017: Submissions deadline for intentions to contribute

28th February 2018: Notification of relevance sent to authors

31st May  2018: submission of full papers
7th  September  2018: post-review notification of accept / reject /
revisions to authors
7th December  2018: Deadline for submission of revised papers
8th February  2019: Final selected papers to production
September  2019: Publication of the Special Issue
References

Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2014. Commun: Essai sur la révolution
au XXIe siècle. La Decouverte.

Dijck, José van. 2013. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of
Social Media. Oxford University Press.

Ehn, Pelle. 1989. Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts.
Arbetslivscentrum.

———. 2008. ‘Participation in Design Things’. In Proceedings of the Tenth
Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008, 92–101. PDC ’08.
Indianapolis, IN, USA: Indiana University.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1795234.1795248.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. 1 edition.
Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press.

Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom, eds. 2007. Understanding Knowledge as a
Commons: From Theory to Practice. 1 edition. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Light, Ann, and Yoko Akama. 2014. ‘Structuring Future Social Relations: The
Politics of Care in Participatory Practice’. In Proceedings of the 13th
Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers - Volume 1, 151–160. PDC
’14. New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/2661435.2661438.

Mol, Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols. 2015. Care in Practice:
On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Bielefeld: Transcript Publishers.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions
for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

Srnicek, Nick. 2016. Platform Capitalism. John Wiley & Sons.

Teli, Maurizio, Angela Di Fiore, and Vincenzo D’Andrea. 2017. ‘Computing
and the Common: A Case of Participatory Design with Think Tanks’. CoDesign
13 (2): 83–95. doi:10.1080/15710882.2017.1309439.
Instructions for Authors

Potential contributors should send an intention to contribute (deadline
22nd December 2017) of 1000 – 1500 words that outlines the content of the
paper and a concise summary of the article’s research contributions. This
document should also make it clear how the authors intended submission
relates to the overall scope and specific themes and issues of this special
issue. The document should be sent by email to
codesignsharingcaring at m-iti.org in pdf format.

The special issue editorial team will provide a short review of the
intention to contribute and will notify authors whether their work is in
scope of the special issue call (notifications by 28th February 2018).
Submissions within scope and with a potentially strong research
contribution will be invited to submit a full paper.
Submissions of full papers (for invited authors)

Those authors who proceed past the intention to contribute phase will be
invited to submit a full paper (maximum 7000 words including tables,
references, captions, footnotes and endnotes) that will be subjected to the
normal double-blind peer review process of the CoDesign journal.
Manuscripts should be prepared according to guidelines which can be found
on the journal website (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/ncdn - link
“Instructions for Authors”). The deadline for full paper submissions is
31st May 2018.

All full paper submissions should be made online at the CoDesign Manuscript
Central site at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ncdn. Authors should
select submission to Special Issue “Repositioning Co-Design in the age of
platform capitalism: from sharing to caring” when uploading manuscripts.

New users will need to create an account. Instructions on how to do this
can be found on the same website. All published articles will undergo
rigorous peer review, based on initial guest editors screening and
anonymous refereeing by independent expert referees.

Potential authors should contact the guest editors at
codesignsharingcaring at m-iti.org  with any questions about the Special Issue.

For further Information about CoDesign go to:
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/ncdn