Maurizio Teli

Public design of digital commons in urban places

This paper can be framed within the growing interest in the public dimension of technology design: it proposes a framework for the public design of urban technologies by elaborating on the concepts of digital commons, matters of concerns and engagement. The framework is discussed through the case study of a mobility application developed within a wider project of digital commons design. We contrast a Smart City approach and a urban computing one, and we argue that the latter is more fruitful in the long run, since it entails elements for the establishment of forms of recursive engagement of users, who co-produce digital commons together with technology designers as a response to their matters of concern. Applying our framework to the design of urban technologies, we conclude that design should support collaborative practices starting from the articulation of matters of concern to designing in a participatory way. HighlightsDigital commons are digital resources self-governed by concerned people.Public design is designing for publics and in the public dimension.Recursive publics are the publics recursively concerned with digital commons.Designers position themselves in relation to public issues.Urban places are an arena for the public design of digital commons.

Beyond Capital: Values, Commons, Computing, and the Search for a Viable Future

The financial/social cataclysm beginning in 2007 ended notions of a great moderation and the view that capitalism had overcome its systemic tendencies to crisis. The subsequent failure of contemporary social formations to address the causes of the crisis gives renewed impetus to better analysis in aid of the search for a better future. This book contributes to this search by reviving a broad discussion of what we humans might want a post-capitalist future to be like. It argues for a comparative anthropological critique of capital notions of value, thereby initiating the search for a new set of values, as well as identifying a number of selected computing practices that might evoke new values. It articulates a suggestive set of institutions that could support these new values, and formulates a group of measurement practices usable for evaluating the proposed institutions. The book is grounded in contemporary social science, political theory, and critical theory. It aims to leverage the possibility of alternative futures implied by some computing practices while avoiding hype and technological determinism, and uses these computing practices to explicate one possible way to think about the future.

Biography of a Design Project through the Lens of a Facebook Page

This paper presents spazioD, a design case around the topic of dyslexia. Building on selected contributions from the literature on infrastructuring in participatory design and publics, it proposes that digital platforms are artefacts that can help infrastructuring the formation of publics and study their biography. The paper then unfolds describing the context in which the case was situated, presenting a specific digital platform (i.e. Facebook) and how it was enacted. The contribution of the paper is threefold: it provides a practice-based instance of the activities entangled in the infrastructuring of publics; building on this description, it shows how a digital platform can contribute to infrastructuring; and, finally, it articulates how the analytical tool embedded in the digital platform contribute to and influence the interpretation of an infrastructuring process and their limitations.

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.

Computing and the common: a case of Participatory Design with think tanks

Abstract With this paper, we contribute to the ongoing discussion on the transformations of Participatory Design to address current societal transformations. We focus on how the implications of the emergence of financialised capitalism could be reduced by the nourishment of the common. In taking this approach, we claim that nourishing the common, which refers to the ensemble of the material and symbolic elements that tie together human beings, would allow a renewal of Participatory Design, reinvigorating its political agenda. We base our reasoning on a project called ThinkDigiTank, the goal of which is the construction of a digital platform supporting a network of Italian organisations aimed at producing political and cultural thinking. In this paper, we theoretically articulate the needs of a PD process nourishing the common and we discuss the empirical case, highlighting the possibilities of a renewal in PD and practical strategies to support commoning practices.

Intercalating the social and the technical: socially robust and enduring computing

This short paper presents our research agenda for a more socially oriented software production, drawing upon the empirical evidences of failure of software organisation in providing enduring software. Constructing a socio-technical perspective on the basis of social sciences research on technology, we outline a research program aimed at building software that could be more reliable and be useful longer. Our guiding principles are the symmetry between the social and the technical, and their intercalation in the development process, and Participatory Design is one of our foundational disciplines.

Teaching participatory design: a participatory approach

In this paper we describe our experience in teaching Participatory Design during a period of student activism. The paper begins with an introduction to the general contexts, characterised by widespread university budget cuts and student activism, and our positioning as course instructors. Drawing upon different conceptualisations of participation, from innovation to motivation, we describe and analyse our experience in teaching a course as it was a Participatory Design project, discussing with students not only some side elements but the whole course details and structure. In conclusions, we show under which conditions this approach is able to re-frame the power balance between teachers and students.

Fostering commonfare. strategies and tactics in a collaborative project

This paper contributes to the discourse on HCI and political economy, further developing theoretical concepts of strategies and tactics by drawing on the original work of French scholar Michel de Certeau. Strategies and tactics are developed and used as a lens to reflect and understand decisions made throughout an IT design process oriented toward infrastructuring social collaboration among people who are struggling financially. We demonstrate this by presenting the case of Commonfare, an EU funded project, and we focus, in particular, on the relationships between specific research and pilot project consortium partners. We explore decisions and actions that take place over four months between two milestones of the project - the first platform release, and a general assembly.

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.

Fostering Commonfare. Infrastructuring Autonomous Social Collaboration

Recently, HCI scholars have started questioning the relationship between computing and political economy, with both general analyses of such relationships, and specific design cases describing design interventions. This paper contributes to this stream of reflections, and argues that IT designers and HCI scholars can critically engage with the contemporary phase of capitalism by infrastructuring the emergence of new institutional forms of autonomous social collaboration through IT projects. More specifically, we discuss strategies and tactics that are available for IT designers embracing an activist agenda while infrastructuring autonomous social collaborations. We draw on empirical data from an H2020 EU funded project -- Commonfare -- that seeks to foster the emergence of alternative forms of welfare provision rooted in social collaboration. In this context, we discuss how the necessary multiple relations that unfold in a project with such ambitions shape both the language and the technologies of the project itself.