Matthias Korn

Public deliberation in municipal planning: supporting action and reflection with mobile technology

This paper reports on an exploratory participatory design process aimed at supporting citizen deliberation in municipal planning. It presents the main outcomes of this process in terms of selected prototypes and an approach to the use setting. We support and discuss different ways for citizens to act and reflect on proposed plans: in-situ, while physically close to the planning object, and ex-situ, when citizens are remote from this. The support of in-situ and ex-situ participation allows citizens to engage in continuous reflection-in and on-action as a collaborative activity with other citizens, hereby inspiring citizens to increase their democratic engagement.

Looking ahead : how field trials can work in iterative and exploratory design of ubicomp systems

We investigate in which forms field trials are a workable model as part of an exploratory design process for sporadic, mobile, non-work settings. A major concern of evaluating ubicomp systems is to study how practices and context of use emerge and develop over time when new technology is introduced. To introduce a sophisticated version of our own prototype in the course of an iterative design process, we conducted a public field trial of the system---a new platform for mobile democratic discussions in municipal planning---that we distributed via the Android Market. However, it turned out to be surprisingly difficult to evaluate our design in a setting that stretches over time, place, and without a preselected set of users. Analyzing our difficulties, we develop a general model for methods studying ubicomp systems. On the basis of this model, we characterize an openly interactive approach to field trials in order to look ahead rather than back.

Infra)structures of Volunteering

We report on the results of a diary study of the everyday volunteering and help giving of individuals in the millennial generation. We describe the breadth of work structures implicated in volunteering, the social structures implicated in volunteering, and the interdependencies between the two. We analyze the roles that technology plays in volunteering with a particular focus on the forms of infrastructure that are constituted through the work and social structures of this philanthropic activity. Finally, we reflect on design opportunities for infrastructures where work and social structures meet to support more everyday, ubiquitous forms of volunteering.

Talking it further: from feelings and memories to civic discussions in and about places

Civic engagement systems to date frequently focus on purely rational aspects of deliberation void of emotions. In order to empower youth in a largely immigrant and lower-income neighborhood, we designed a location-based storytelling and story experiencing system for web-enabled mobile phones. The system is based on a novel concept of pervasive play where stories emerge and develop on several dimensions -- most notably for our design a geographical one. This system functions as a research instrument in this paper. Through a qualitative analysis of the comments made through the system, we find (1) memories, feelings, and attitudes to be prime means of expression for youth, (2) the expression of such personal emotions leading to civic discussions, and (3) such discussions expanding over geographic areas in the neighborhood. Consequently, we argue for an approach to locative civic engagement systems that takes a vantage point in youths emotions rather than a very rational and dry approach to deliberation.

Participatory IT in semi-public spaces

This paper reports on an in-the-wild design experiment aiming to support participation and engagement in the semi-public space of a temporary art exhibition. Through interviews with 19 visitors we analyze the collaborative production of text about artworks in the exhibition in the physical space of the gallery. Our design, deployed throughout the venue for one month, makes use of peoples personal mobile phones to interact with shared digital displays in the gallery. The findings help us understand and develop the notion of local participatory IT from actual use. We discuss peoples diverging perceptions of what one is participating in and why as well as the impact of previous experiences with mobile technology. This leads us to propose three strong concepts to support understanding and design of technologies that foster local participation: Local area networking, hyperlocality, and global read/local write.

WiFi proximity detection in mobile web applications

We present a technique for enabling WiFi proximity detection in mobile web applications based on proximity-adaptive HTTP responses (PAHR). The technique requires zero installation on the client and is client platform independent. Our reference implementation ProxiMagic is low-cost and provides robust and responsive interactivity based on proximity detection. We demonstrate the techniques applicability through a real-world example application deployed during a month-long participatory art exhibition. We document the reliability and suitability of the simple proximity detection employed in ProxiMagic through a controlled experiment.

Hacking as Transgressive Infrastructuring: Mobile Phone Networks and the German Chaos Computer Club

This paper applies the theoretical lens of infrastructure to study hacking practices that take issue with large-scale communication networks. The paper analyzes a series of hacks targeting the Global System for Mobile Communications (i.e., networks for mobile telephony) carried out by a cluster of people affiliated or sympathetic to the German Chaos Computer Club between 2001 and 2014. These hacks aim at acquiring proprietary knowledge and facilitating the autonomous operation of local mobile phone networks for communities, independent of corporate network providers. The contribution of this paper is to show how hacking of this kind can be understood as transgressive infrastructuring, a way of engaging critically with infrastructure that, in the case of GSM hacking, relied on three strategies---reverse engineering, re-implementation, and parallel operation, all of which aim at appropriating the targeted network intellectually, legally, functionally, and/or operationally.

Local area artworks: collaborative art interpretation on-site

In this paper we present Local Area Artworks, a system enabling collaborative art interpretation on-site deployed during an exhibition in a local art gallery. Through the system, we explore ways to re-connect people to the local place by making use of their personal mobile devices as interfaces to the shared physical space. We do this by re-emphasizing the local characteristics of wireless networks over the global connectivity to the Internet. With a collaborative writing system in a semi-public place, we encourage local art discussions and provide a platform for the public to actively participate in interpretations of individual artworks. Our preliminary findings suggest that people were (to our surprise) not questioning the inner workings of our system. Through engaging with the system, individuals felt being part of the exhibition. However, no coherent piece of text emerged during the runtime of the exhibition.

Designing Against the Status Quo

In this one-day workshop, we interrogate design strategies of troubling, friction, queering, and contestation that aim to question the status quo. In ways that are playful, heretical, theoretical, and applied we examine tactics that make space for alternative values to emerge in everyday life. Recent design strategies in this space include Lights adaptation of feminist and queer theory in proposing design that troubles and queers the status quo, Korn and Voidas adaptation of anthropological theory and theories of the everyday to call for design that causes friction, and DiSalvos formulation of adversarial design as a way of challenging conventional politics. As we design interactive systems that, on the one hand, seek to be accountable in responding to current and future societal challenges, and, on the other, are becoming ever more complex, we ask what trends in destabilizing and rethinking may help us innovate in both method and outcome.

From Facebook to the Neighbourhood: Infrastructuring of Hybrid Community Engagement

In recent years, social media have increased the resources that individuals and organizations are able to mobilize for the development of socially innovative practices. In this article, we engage with a naturally occurring development in a Trentinian neighbourhood to examine the cooperative interactions amongst members of a local community. The first author and local residents of the neighbourhood participated in online discussions, decision making, and physical activities that led to material changes in the area. The interventions are motivated by and based on the concept of Social Street that combines online interactions in a closed Facebook group with face-to-face meetings seeking to practically engage the collective in accomplishing certain immediate or ongoing needs. Over the course of two years, we studied this local instantiation of Social Street in Trento, Italy by way of an action-oriented (digital) ethnography. Through this work, we demonstrate how urban neighbourhoods might benefit from hybrid forms of community engagement that are enacted through a constant back and forth between online and face-to-face interactions. We further argue that the infrastructuring of local urban collectives should follow strategies that pay attention to the multiple issues in urban neighbourhoods and people’s attachments to them. Overall, the paper reflects upon the challenges and configurations of participation that this form of community-work entails.