Call for Participation

Our one-day workshop at ACM DIS 2024 (Tuesday ^2nd July) will push the boundaries of citizen-centred design and digital social innovation. We aim to foster dialogue, fuel design imagination and support knowledge exchange amongst the design community and industry practitioners. Specifically, those interested in citizen-centred design for technology development with civic and third sector organizations and marginalized and under-served communities. We will address complex challenges around notions of the ‘Digital Citizen’ and the contested framings of citizenship within citizen-centred design projects. The workshop will present keynote speakers, provide opportunities for presenting position papers, and contribute to live case studies of civic and third sector development projects, brought to the workshop by industry partners. Specific themes and challenges that the workshop seeks to address include:

• What is a ‘Digital Citizen’?
• What are we designing for when designing for and with the ‘Digital Citizen’?
• How do we design for and with ‘Digital Citizens’ through ‘citizen-centred design’?
• What are potential radical re-imaginaries of the ‘Digital Citizen’?

The workshop will galvanise a critical position around the ‘Digital Citizen’, informing future calls for academic papers, will support sharing and documenting of best practice in citizen-centred design and will support engagement in live civic design cases.

To participate: attendees are asked to submit (via email to the workshop chairs – (david.kirk@newcastle.ac.uk) a 1-page (500 word) position paper (.docx or .pdf) addressing the workshop themes and challenges, or for industry practitioners - case study materials of a similar size, detailing an ongoing citizen-centred design project to be discussed at the workshop.

Please submit your position paper by end of day (extended deadline) Friday 31st May (AoE time).

Workshop Activities

In preparation for the workshop participants will be asked to write down a one-sentence statement by hand in big letters or printed (font size minimum 48) on one A4 that they will bring to the workshop. This statement will be used during the Pecha Kucha presentations and the afternoon group work.

The morning session of the workshop will begin with introduction of the organizers and the workshop format. Then participants will share their position papers in a Pecha Kucha style, followed by a keynote address and moderated Q&A. This will allow for quick networking and identification of key interests. Before lunch invited participants will share two cases from Sweden and Denmark, which will be used as hands-on cases for discussion of the key themes during the afternoon session.

In the afternoon session participants will be divided into pre-defined discussion groups. Each group will be assigned one of the workshops themes and will be tasked with providing a solution for one of presented cases from the assigned theme's standpoint. Discussions will be facilitated by the organizers and supported with materials for collective sketching and making. Each group will develop suggestions in form of a digital citizen persona and scenario. Groups will present their work in a plenary session where organizers will facilitate a discussion addressing the challenges of defining and understanding the Digital Citizen based on critical reflections from the hands-on work on the case studies. The workshop will end with a plenary session in which we will wrap up the day and discuss future collaborations.

Organizers

Suzan Boztepe is Associate Professor of Design at Linköping University, Sweden. Her research focuses on design as a driver of organizational change and economic value creation. Her most recent work explores civic engagement, digital transformation, and design capacity building in the public sector.

Jörn Christiansson is Associate Professor in Interaction Design at the Digital Design Department at IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was PI in the recently closed Nordic research project CAPE – Civic Agency in Public E-service Innovation (financed by NordForsk). His research focus is on co-design and participatory design, particularly exploring design approaches for civic engagement and empowerment of digitally vulnerable user groups in public sector digitalization.

Amalia de Götzen is Associate Professor at Aalborg University in Copenhagen and a member of the Service Design Lab. Amalia’s research activity focuses on Digital Social Innovation, particularly on data-driven service design and how current technologies can support the designer practice and complement their toolkit.

Nils Ehrenberg is a postdoctoral researcher in design at Aalto University, Finland. His research explores ethics, design, and digitalisation. His current research explores how the digitalisation of domestic spaces re-shapes power relations.

Erik Grönvall is Associate Professor at IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is Head of the CoDesign research group and works in the fields of Participatory Design, HCI and CSCW. Recent work explores participatory processes in municipal and public sector, innovation capability building in organizations and online platforms for knowledge and capacity building and ongoing design processes.

David Kirk [Workshop Lead] is Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Director of Open Lab in the School of Computing, at Newcastle University, UK. He is Principal Investigator for the EPSRC-funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics and for the EPSRC Digital Economy Centre for Digital Citizens. His research focuses on the value-centred design of socio-technical systems. He has organised and led numerous successful workshops at major conferences (including DIS and CHI).

Shaun Lawson is Professor of Social Computing and Head of Department in the School of Computer and Information Sciences, at Northumbria University, UK. He is the Principal Investigator for the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Citizen-Centred Artificial Intelligence.

Per Linde is Senior Lecturer at Malmö University, Sweden. His research is mainly in the areas of participatory design of IoT, smart cities, and place-specific computing. His most recent work focuses on the role and effect of technology on different governance models.

Joanna Saad-Sulonen is Associate Professor at the School of Engineering Sciences, Department of Software Engineering, at LUT University in Finland. Joanna has a background in architecture and digital design. Her research work focuses on understanding the way civic participation intersects with participation in the design of digital technology and services, and expanding the understanding of participatory design to include grassroots design and commoning practices.

Vasilis Vlachokyriakos is Reader of Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Civics at Open Lab, in the School of Computing at Newcastle University, UK, and the founder of Open Lab Athens. His research centres on designing novel socio-technical infrastructures for civic participation through place-based, participatory and action-led research, aiming at the development of systems for cooperative decision-making and service provision (i.e. CSCW and PD research and practice).