Thomas Lodato

Issue-oriented hackathons as material participation

In recent years, intensive design and development events known as hackathons have become increasingly common. Issue-oriented hackathons are a subset of this trend that bring together ad hoc groups under the auspices of conceiving and prototyping technologies to address social conditions and concerns. In this article, we present ethnographic accounts of a set of issue-oriented hackathons that took place in the United States between 2012 and 2013, in order to explore how these events structure and express emerging forms of participation. Specifically, we propose that issue-oriented hackathons are sites of experimental material participation.

The collective articulation of issues as design practice

In this paper we discuss one practice of social design and social innovation by which designers and participants work together to reveal the factors, relations and consequences of an issue. We refer to this as the collective articulation of issues. Within the context of social design and social innovation the articulation of issues takes on a distinctive character and can be manifested through a wider range of design engagements than previously considered. To support our discussion we analyse two design engagements from the growBot Garden project, a research project exploring technologies for small-scale agriculture. Through this analysis we identify the qualities of the event and pluralism as central to the collective articulation of issues. We argue that the collective articulation of issues is a foundational practice of social design and social innovation, comprising an outcome and purpose in its own right.

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.

Designing Speculative Civics

As human computer interaction design research continues to expand domains, civics is emerging as an important subject through which to explore how computation shapes our public lives. In this paper we present and reflect upon a series of research through design (RtD) projects that investigate speculative civic contexts. From this, we identify and discuss tactics that can be employed in RtD projects: RtD as Representations of Systems Yet-to-Come, RtD as Prototyping Systems and RtD as Use of a System. Then we identify and discuss thematic interpretations of civics that emerged through our designs: Mediated Civics, Computed Civics, and Proxied Civics. This work contributes to discourses of speculative design, research through design, and those of civics in human computer interaction design research.

Building belonging

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

Institutional constraints: the forms and limits of participatory design in the public realm

In recent years, participatory design (PD) has increasingly occurred in the context of various public, private, governmental, and non-governmental institutions operating in the public realm. This context has led some to call for more direct attention to the ways institutions frame PD, particularly the practice and process of encouraging institutional change (i.e. institutioning). Building on this work, we introduce the idea of institutional constraints as particular interactions between PD practices and institutional frames. Using the concepts of thinging, infrastructuring, and commoning as analytical lenses on three empirical cases found within so-called smart city efforts, we identify, name, and describe three provisional institutional constraints---the sandbox, the administrative gap, and the ideological mismatch. These institutional constraints provide concrete articulations of PDs form within neoliberalization---a form marked by circumscribed, austere, opaque, and fraught interventions inextricable from processes of urbanization. As a first step for contemporary PD processes and research, we argue that the empirical description of institutional constraints is a means to assess the contemporary limitations of PD and a resource to create new strategies and tactics for doing PD in the contemporary public realm.

PD manifesto for AI futures

A deep discussion and reflection on the implications surrounding the design, development, and deployment of what are being described as artificially intelligent systems is urgent. We propose that within this context, Participatory Design, not only has much to offer, it has a responsibility to deeply engage. This workshop brings together practitioners and researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to discuss and reflect on the cultural, ethical, political, and social implications surrounding the design, development, and deployment of intelligent systems and to explore participatory design approaches, tools, and guidelines that should ground the design of intelligent systems.

Open government data in the smart city: Interoperability, urban knowledge, and linking legacy systems

ABSTRACTOpen government data (OGD) promise to reveal new insights and inform governance decisions related to changing populations, departmental operations, and economic drivers. Yet, where OGD figure prominently in the vision of a smart city, OGD are, in fact, scarce. From production and distribution practices to file types, organizational structure, and repositories, large quantities of potential OGD remain as legacy data trapped in incumbent systems. This article confronts the challenges of legacy data through a constructivist analysis of data wrangling (i.e., converting data into useful formats). The analysis illustrates that wrangling legacy data is more than a rote technical activity. Our findings suggest that smart governance in practice depends on the ways in which social, organizational, and institutional strategies cope with technical change. Further, our research demonstrates that wrangling legacy data is not a discrete problem to overcome but an operating condition defining the rapidly changing...

Where's love in e-waste?

This workshop focuses on how the notion of love can help explore and define participatory strategies targeted at dealing with issues surrounding e-waste. In particular, the workshop aims to leverage Participatory Design practice in transforming peoples relationships with e-waste from negative affective relationships into positive ones through engagement, co-creation, and group envisioning. The workshop focuses particularly on existent e-waste, accepting it as an (unfortunate) outcome of current production strategies in need of change.