Giacomo Poderi

Disentangling participation through time and interaction spaces–the case of IT design for energy demand management

Abstract Participatory Design has recently seen growing interest in developing critical forms of reflexivity able to disentangle the complexity of participatory ensembles. This article makes a methodological contribution to this endeavour. Drawing on socio-cognitive analyses of collaborative design, it proposes the frame of ‘interaction spaces’ as a scaffolding tool for conducting retrospective analyses of participatory design processes. The paper uses the ‘interaction spaces’ frame to analyse the three years of collaborative activities of the CIVIS Project. Through a longitudinal and multi-dimensional account of participatory dynamics involved in the designing, prototyping and testing of an IT platform for home energy management, the frame evidences how participatory configurations evolve over time; it makes clearer the characteristics of participation as partial and overtaken; and it identifies moments of cross-participation as potential basis for the boundary-spanning of design issues.

YouPower: An open source platform for community-oriented smart grid user engagement

This paper presents YouPower, an open source platform designed to make people more aware of their energy consumption and encourage sustainable consumption with local communities. The platform is designed iteratively in collaboration with users in the Swedish and Italian test sites of the project to improve the design and increase active user participation. The community-oriented design is composed of parts that link energy data to energy actions, provide comparisons at different levels, generate dynamic time-of-use signals, offer energy conservation suggestions, and support social sharing. The goal is to bridge peoples attitude-behavior gap in energy consumption and to facilitate the behavior change process towards sustainable energy consumption that is implementable in peoples daily life. Preliminary results show that community-oriented energy intervention has the potential to improve user engagement significantly.

Exploring alternative participatory budgeting approaches as means for citizens engagement: The case of energy

This exploratory paper reflects on the activities of an European project that explores novel forms of citizens engagement with the twofold objective of exploring alternative governance approaches to renewable energy sources and of reducing and optimizing energy consumption. This exploratory vision is inquired through the use of ICTs tools in connection with a new deliberative process built upon the participatory budgeting model. The paper describes the energy budgeting framework and provides empirical insights grounded on its ongoing implementation and trialing. We provide two main points of discussion regarding social acceptance of technology and the shifting from a monetary budget to a energy one.

Teaching participatory design

The goal of this full-day workshop is to create a place where people can share experiences, plans, and questions about teaching Participatory Design (PD). We aim to create a context for all of us to talk about how we design and set up courses, what challenges we face and how we solve them. The workshop is for people who are interested in the way people teach as well as in what is taught and what resources are gathered to aid the process. During the workshop, we will explore in an interactive manner how constructivist approaches to teaching can support the teaching and learning of participatory design in academic and non-academic contexts. We will also discuss experiences in using recent material such as the new (2012) PD Handbook. We hope that this dialogue can become a regular part of PDC.

Simple conversational practices in the case of free and open source software infrastructure

The aim of this paper is to provide insights on how the infrastructure of a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) project is used by the participants while they bring forward their own contributions. Specific case used for this paper is a mature development project of a video game. Several discussions were collected from the development board of the projects Internet forum and analysed through the inductive and iterative process of the Grounded Theory methodology. The paper identifies the emerging conversational practices of positioning, linking the scattered, setting a positive atmosphere, constructing citizenship and it discusses them in relation to the distributed nature of the project.

Embedding internet-of-things in large-scale socio-technical systems: A community-oriented design in future smart grids

In traditional engineering, technologies are viewed as the core of the engineering design, in a physical world with a large number of diverse technological artefacts. The real world, however, also includes a huge number of social components—people, communities, institutions, regulations and everything that exists in the human mind—that have shaped and been shaped by the technological components. Smart urban ecosystems are examples of large-scale Socio-Technical Systems (STS) that rely on technologies, in particular on the Internet-of-Things (IoT), within a complex social context where the technologies are embedded. Designing applications that embed both social complexity and IoT in large-scale STS requires a Socio-Technical (ST) approach, which has not yet entered the mainstream of design practice. This chapter reviews the literature and presents our experience of adopting an ST approach to the design of a community-oriented smart grid application. It discusses the challenges, process and outcomes of this apporach, and provides a set of lessons learned derived from this experience that are also deemed relevant to the design of other smart urban ecosystems.