Joanna Saad-Sulonen

'A Farmer, a Place and at least 20 Members': The Development of Artifact Ecologies in Volunteer-based Communities

In this paper, we present a case study of an urban organic food community and examine the way the community shapes its artifact ecology through a combination of appropriation of freely or cheaply available tools, and the long-term effort of building the communitys own website. Based on participatory observation, content analysis of communication documents, and a series of interviews, we see how the collection of artifacts that a community uses to support their practice form what we refer to as their community artifact ecology. A community artifact ecology is multifaceted, dynamic and pending on what the members bring to the table, as well as on particular situations of use. The community artifact ecology concept is important for CSCW as it enables framing of the relationship between communities and technologies beyond the single artifact and beyond a static view of a dedicated technology.

Happenstance, Strategies and Tactics: Intrinsic Design in a Volunteer-based Community

This paper presents the study of a volunteer community, its technologies, and the processes in and through which it develops, sustains and makes its community artifact ecology work. Based on previous work proposing the concept of community artifact ecology as a way of understanding the constellation of technologies a community owns, has access to and uses in their practices, we examine the dynamics and development of such a community artifact ecology in detail. The findings indicate that in volunteer communities developing a working community artifact ecology is a process mixing happenstance, community strategies and everyday tailoring and appropriation tactics. Additionally, much of the design and infrastructuring work in shaping the community artifact ecology and making it work both blurs with use and can be considered as intrinsic design as it is conducted by members of the community, with no input from the outside. Based on the empirical findings we expand on multiple positions within the theoretical space of design-in-use and intrinsic practice transformation mediated by technology and conclude with a more multi-faceted understanding of the shaping of technology in volunteer-based communities.

Setting up a public participation project using the urban mediator tool: a case of collaboration between designers and city planners

The Urban Mediator software is a web-based framework for sharing, obtaining and gathering location-based information. This paper presents an overview of the possibilities and limitations of this system for end-user development and co-design. The issues are analyzed through the case study of a public citizen participation project that used the software and was set up in collaboration between designers from the University of Art and Design Helsinki, and planners from the City of Helsinki Planning Department, during spring 2008. The collaborative work between the design team and the city planners, as well as the flexible and extensible features of the Urban Mediator, enabled the setting up of a successful small scale urban planning participative project as well as the further development of the Urban Mediator system.

Unfolding participation over time: temporal lenses in participatory design

Abstract Participatory design (PD) research has historically strongly focused on the reporting of design events (e.g. workshops and prototyping activities with participants), where issues such as ‘involving users’, including the users’ point of view, and participation as a matter of mutual learning have been in the foreground. The need to further problematise and critically examine participation is nonetheless apparent. This special issue aims to shed light on participation as it unfolds over time during, between and beyond participatory events such as these. Here, we build an overview of existing directions taken by researchers to address the unfolding of participation in IT design over time. We do this by examining existing PD literature and the four contributions to this special issue. We identify two common temporalities in PD, the future-oriented and the project-based, and propose five lenses that may aid researchers in exploring and understanding the temporal dimensions of participation in their projects: the phasic, emergent, retrospective, prospective and long-term lenses. We end with propositions and opportunities for future research directions in PD, highlighting the multi-faceted nature of the temporality of participation.

Unfolding participation over time in the design of IT

The aim of this special issue is to continue and contribute to the debate around the conceptualisations and understandings of participation in Participatory Design (PD) and related areas of human–computer interaction (HCI) research, recently invigorated by Vines et al. (2015 Vines, John, Rachel Clarke, Ann Light, and Peter Wright. 2015. “The Beginnings, Middles and Endings of Participatory Research in HCI: An Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘Perspectives on Participation’”, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 74: 77–80.10.1016/j.ijhcs.2014.11.002), Halskov and Hansen (2015 Halskov, Kim, and Nicolai B. Hansen. 2015. “The Diversity of Participatory Design Research Practice at PDC 2002–2012”. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 74: 81–92.10.1016/j.ijhcs.2014.09.003) and Saad-Sulonen et al. (2015 Saad-Sulonen, Joanna, Kim Halskov, Liesbeth Huybrechts, John Vines, Eva Eriksson, and Helena Karasti. 2015. “Unfolding Participation. What Do We Mean by Participation – Conceptually and in Practice”. In Proceedings of the 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference, Critical Alternatives – Vol. 2, 5–8. New York: ACM.). Ongoing transformations in IT-mediated participation in contemporary societies are challenging us to explore the changing nature of participation in IT design. Some of the questions that emerge relate to the need to rethink notions and practices of participation as they relate to temporality. We are now seeing a multitude of PD research and practice that range in temporal scale, from single projects taking place at one point in time to connected and hard to delineate projects that occur over years. Researchers are starting to acknowledge the significance of PD work that occurs in the background and in-between the typically reported on design activities conducted with participants. Furthermore, we’ve seen recent discussions emerge around the ways activities conducted both prior and after the typical project time of PD can impact and influence research and practice; from shaping eventual outcomes based on decisions made prior to involving participants in design, to considering the long-term sustainability, scalability and transferability of outcomes and learnings. As such, the temporal dimensions of PD are expanding greatly both conceptually and in practice. Our special issue aims to address these emerging areas of interest in PD.

Infrastructuring in PD: what does infrastructuring look like? when does it look like that?

In1 this hands-on workshop we invite the PD community to take stock of empirical insights and conceptual developments around the notions of infrastructure and infrastructuring. We propose that by leveraging the original relational nature of these concepts, we can revitalize the political soul of PD and better characterize the politics of participation in digitalization phenomena and processes ongoing in all walks of life. With a hands-on approach we will collectively and critically map, disentangle assumptions, identify blind spots and outline new research opportunities charting the possibilities and limitations of an infrastructuring approach in PD at large.