Mariam Asad

Planning with Crowdsourced Data: Rhetoric and Representation in Transportation Planning

We are in the midst of a new era of experimentation that blends social and mobile computing in support of digital democracy. These experiments will have potentially long lasting consequences on how the public is invited to partic-ipate in governance by elected as well as professional offi-cials. In this paper, we look at how data from a purpose-built smartphone app we deployed were incorporated into a three-day urban planning event. The data collected were meant to help inform design decisions for new cycling in-frastructure and to provide an alternate means for partici-pating in the planning process. Through our analysis, we point to three distinct roles the data played at the event-as authority, as evidence, and as ambivalent. Each role demonstrates the challenge and potential for turning to crowdsourced data as a form of participation and as a re-source for urban planning.

Crowdsourcing and Its Application to Transportation Data Collection and Management

The participation of a large and varied group of people in the planning process has long been encouraged to increase the effectiveness and acceptability of plans. However, in practice, participation by affected stakeholders has often been limited to small groups, both because of the lack of reach on the part of planners and because of a sense of little or no ownership of the process on the part of citizens. Overcoming these challenges to stakeholder participation is particularly important for any transportation planning process because the success of the system depends primarily on its ability to cater to the requirements and preferences of the people whom the system serves. Crowdsourcing uses the collective wisdom of a crowd to achieve a solution to a problem that affects the crowd. This paper proposes the use of crowdsourcing as a possible mechanism to involve a large group of stakeholders in transportation planning and operations. Multiple case studies show that crowdsourcing was used to collect data from a wide range of stakeholders in transportation projects. Two distinct crowdsourcing usage types are identified: crowdsourcing for collecting normally sparse data on facilities such as bike routes and crowdsourcing for soliciting feedback on transit quality of service and real-time information quality. A final case study exemplifies the use of data quality auditors for ensuring the usability of crowd-sourced data, one of many potential issues in crowdsourcing presented in the paper. These case studies show that crowdsourcing has immense potential to replace or augment traditional ways of collecting data and feedback from a wider group of a transportation systems users without creating an additional financial burden.

Object-Oriented Publics

Social computing-or computing in a social context-has largely concerned itself with understanding social interaction among and between people. This paper asserts that ignoring material components-including computing itself-as social actors is a mistake. Computing has its own agenda and agencies, and including it as a member of the social milieu provides a means of producing design objects that attend to how technology use can extend beyond merely amplifying or augmenting human actions. In this paper, we offer examples of projects that utilize the capacity of object-oriented publics to both analyze the conditions and consequences around existing publics and engage with matters of concern inherent to emerging publics. Considering how computing as an actor contributes to the construction of publics provides insight into the design of computational systems that address issues. We end by introducing the idea of the object ecology as a way to coordinate design approaches to computational publics.

Creating a Sociotechnical API: Designing City-Scale Community Engagement

Community engagement is to cities what user experience is to computing: it signifies a large category that simultaneously speaks to general qualities of interaction and to specific ways of doing that interaction. Recently, digital civics has emerged as a research area with a comprehensive approach to designing for civic encounters where community engagement is a primary concern for designing systems and processes that support broad civic interaction. In short, over the past year, we worked with municipal officials, service providers, and city residents to design a community engagement playbook detailing best practices for city-scale engagement. The playbook, as well as the collaborative process that produced it, provides a roadmap for thinking through the kinds of systems that might populate the design space of city-scale digital civics. This paper details our design-led research process and builds on emerging literature on designing for digital civic interaction.

Exploring Social Justice, Design, and HCI

The aim of this one-day workshop is to share existing research, discuss common practices, and to develop new strategies and tools for designing for social justice in HCI. This workshop will bring together a set of HCI scholars, designers, and community members to discuss social justice perspectives on interaction design and technology. We will explore theoretical and methodological approaches in and around HCI that can help us generatively consider issues of power, privilege, and access in their complexity. We will discuss the challenges associated with taking a justice approach in HCI, looking toward existing practices we find both productive and problematic. This workshop will bridge current gaps in research and practice by developing concrete strategies for both designing and evaluating social change oriented work in HCI, where agendas are made clear and researchers are held accountable for the outcomes of their work by members of their field site and the research community.

Tap the "Make This Public" Button: A Design-Based Inquiry into Issue Advocacy and Digital Civics

This paper examines the strategies of cycling advocates when deploying digital tools in their advocacy work as they support and create better cycling infrastructure and policies. Over the course of two years, we interviewed and conducted design-based fieldwork in two large U.S. cities with individuals and advocacy organizations, learning about the goals, motivations, and constraints that inform their work in their respective urban homes. Our design-based investigation and fieldwork advance a deeper, situated understanding of the role that computing technology plays when engaging across multiple sites of advocacy work. From this, we add detail to the connections across resources, identities, and issues and continue to advance the emerging area of digital civics, which seeks to design tools that support relational civic interactions across multiple categories of civic actors.

Speculative Activist Technologies

This paper explores the specific needs activists have of the technologies they use to manage their operations and promote their causes. To begin this exploration, we conducted two critical making workshops with participants who self-identified as activists and used craft materials — such as cardboard, color markers, pipe cleaners, etc.—to create speculative technologies to find commonalities across different forms of activist work, be it technological, organizational, or procedural. The needs and concerns expressed in the workshops were articulated through the participants’ designs; they materialized their critiques, reflections, and explorations through their crafted prototypes. These prototypes point to opportunities for creating new design interventions to address the challenges and needs unique to activist organizations. The work suggests the need for more value-sensitivity and context-appropriateness in the design of interactive systems.

Designing for civic events

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole. --- Christopher A. Le Dantec, Editor