Teresa Swist

From products to publics? The potential of participatory design for research on youth, safety and well-being

ABSTRACT This paper considers how ‘participation’ features as a key concept in contemporary approaches to research, policy and interventions to promote young peoples experiences of safety and well-being in digital society. In particular, it examines the potential of participatory design (PD) methodology as a way of expressing, surfacing and supporting engagement with youth perspectives in research and design projects. In doing so, we explore how the language, materials and processes of a PD approach can help reconfigure the aims of research beyond the production of ‘products’ towards fostering ‘youth-inclusive publics’. Drawing on the concept of ‘infrastucturing’ and ‘attachments’ [Le Dantec, C. A., and C. DiSalvo. 2013. “Infrastructuring and the Formation of Publics in Participatory Design.” Social Studies of Science 43 (2): 241–264. doi:10.1177/0306312712471581], the paper reflects on an Australian research project to develop online campaigns to promote youth safety and well-being in digital society. From our analysis emerged three commitments of PD with young people that help articulate, make visible and unpack ‘attachments’ to concepts of youth, technology and well-being and provide new opportunities for engagement with youth experience in research and intervention design. We find that these commitments – the embodiment of context; the enactment of creativity and the emergence of connectivity – offer novel insights on youth participation in complex research projects. Moreover, foregrounding these commitments through PD can build shared vocabularies, artefacts and processes of engagement with young people in research projects focused on youth safety and well-being.

Platforms, data and children’s rights: Introducing a ‘networked capability approach’

In this article, we consider the role of digital platforms for producing data and shaping how children’s rights are understood, monitored and advocated for. We present a typology of platforms impacting children’s rights, followed by the introduction of a ‘networked capability approach’. A case study is used to explore the potential of this approach for examining the purpose, practices and repercussions of digital platforms. We argue that to recognize and actualize children’s rights in a digital age, we need new conceptual tools to examine the interplay of platforms, people and places that include and exclude children’s valued ‘doings and beings’.

‘Cultural making’: how complexity and power relations are modulated in transdisciplinary research

Abstract There is an increasing adoption of large-scale, multisectoral collaborations which draw upon diverse expertise and innovative processes to tackle complex issues. How social change emerges through such transdisciplinary research alliances is the focus of our paper. Yet, broader participation and openness to uncertainty exacerbates issues of multidimensional power and complexity which continually shape and reshape practices. In this article, we introduce the term ‘cultural making’ to illustrate how complexity and power are modulated according to particular interrelationships, roles and understandings. These issues are examined from a particular vantage point, the needs and values of a research enterprise, the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre (Young and Well CRC), and within that, the project Safe and Well Online. Themes of power and complexity are explored in relation to better fulfilling the major aim of Young and Well CRC: to understand and maximize the role of digital technologies to promote the mental health of young people. We demonstrate how the heuristic of ‘cultural making’ blends spatio-temporal critique with practical ontology to consider how proximities, methods and practices unfold within a transdisciplinary research initiative. This lens aims to enhance practical engagement with complexity through showing the changing composition of potentialities and actualizations – and that participation is always a ‘matter of making’.

The labour of communicating publics: Participatory platforms, socio-technical intermediaries and pluralistic expertise:

Kolorob is a participatory platform connecting informal settlement communities with services and informal jobs in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Alongside technological systems, expertise from community, non-government, private-sector, volunteer and academic fields has been integral to the platform’s development. These socio-technical connections and networks, manifest through participatory design, agile software development and collaborative knowledge practices, have become productively entangled in the labour of platform production. We introduce a framework, participatory platform analysis, through which distinct layers – in the form of audiences, intermediaries, interfaces and databases – of this labour can be distinguished and examined. Our analysis draws upon focus group discussions, conducted in Mirpur in 2016 with emergent experts: youth facilitators, field officers and developers. We argue that the interests and tensions of co-designing participatory platforms relating to matters of public concern in South Asian mega-cities are reflective of the rising hybridity of expertise, generated through both institutional training and grass-roots practice, in contemporary urban life. The ‘narrative of expertise in the future’ compels us to recode knowledge production in the here and now: how we are making participatory platforms, the role of socio-technical expertise and the labour of communicating publics.

Place-making in higher education: co-creating engagement and knowledge practices in the networked age

ABSTRACT The pedagogical locations, functions and possibilities of higher education continuously unfold as mobile technologies, digital content and social practices intersect at a rapid pace. There is an urgent need to understand better how student learning is situated within this complex system and interrelates with broader sociotechnical knowledge practices. A geo-phenomenology optic frames this paper, exploring how activity system and affordance theories assist in highlighting the interconnections between online, offline and blended learning environments. Introduced is a theoretical notion of ‘place-making’ which frames how different depths, patterns and modes of learning engagement emerge from the activity system of personal, material and social affordances. It is argued that fostering engagement and co-creating knowledge practices hinge upon increasing awareness of how these nested affordances interrelate with one another. The proposed ‘place-making framework’ has implications for how activity systems of learning, teaching, assessment and research can be integrated meaningfully within pedagogy for the networked age.

Assemblages of altruism in urban service delivery: Seamful designs and cities

ABSTRACT Lack of access to services is one of the chief difficulties faced by marginalized urban communities. The proximity of digital technologies and data promises to remove a key constraint to greater access: the unequal distribution of information. However, issues of digital literacy and affordability and the local specificity of services make opportunities for achieving well-being both a technical and ethical concern. We discuss 2 community-based projects—one in Western Sydney, Australia, and the other in Dhaka, Bangladesh—that sought to unpack this interface through prototyping a combination of offline and online service directories. Through these, we explore what we have termed altruistic assemblages—circulations of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), researchers, local communities, service providers, hackathons, co-design events, and technology devices. The contributed time, resources, hopes and care of these assemblages do not presuppose a finite solution to urban service delivery but rather offer a prefigurative politics for the more equitable cities to come.