Suchergebnisse

Increasingly, governments and organisations publish data on expenditure and finance as 'open' data in order to be more transparent to the public in how funding is spent. Accountable is a web-based tool that visualises and relates open financial data provided by local government and non-profit organisations (NPOs) in the UK. A qualitative study was conducted where Accountable was treated as a technology probe, and used by representatives of NPOs and members of the public who invest their time or effort voluntarily into such organisations. The study highlighted how: current open data sets provided by public bodies are inadequate in their representation of funding structures; the focus on finance and fiscal expenditure in such data makes invisible the in-kind effort of volunteers and the wider beneficiaries of an organisation's work; and problems arising from the interoperability of open data technologies. The paper concludes with implications for the design of future systems, considering the domains of transparency and accountability in relation to the findings.

Digital technologies offer the possibility of community empowerment via the reconfiguration of public services. This potential relies on actively involved citizens engaging with decision makers to pursue civic goals. In this paper we study one such group of involved citizens, examining the evidencing practices of a rare disease charity campaigning for accessible public transport. Through fieldwork and interviews, we highlight the ways in which staff and volunteers assembled and presented different forms of evidence, in doing so reframing what is conceived as 'valid knowledge'. We note the challenges this group faced in capturing experiential knowledge around the accessibility barriers of public transport, and the trade-offs that are made when presenting evidence to policy and decision makers. We offer a number of design considerations for future HCI research, focusing on how digital technology might be configured more appropriately to support campaigning around the politics of mobility.

Background:Co-creation in policymaking is of increasing interest to national governments, and designers play a significant role in its introduction.
Aims and objectives:We discuss instances from our fieldwork that demonstrated how UK Policy Lab used design methods to gain insight into the design-oriented methods introduced to policymakers' practices, and how these may influence conventional policy design processes.
Methods:This paper reports on the learnings from a two-month participant observation at UK Policy Lab conducted in early 2019.
Findings:We found that, beyond human-centred and future-oriented practices, the designers working at this unit appropriate design as a reflective practice for the context of policymaking. We discuss how the use of visual and creative methods of design are utilised by policy designers to facilitate co-creative reflective practices, and how these make a valuable contribution to policymaking practices in UK Government.
Discussion and conclusions:As deliberation and decision making is influenced both by what is thought about as well as who is doing the thinking, reflective practices allow notions and assumptions to be unpicked. Moreover, when done as a group activity, reflection leads to a co-production of a deepened understanding of policy challenges.
Consequently, we argue, the reflective practices introduced by Policy Lab are an essential contribution to developing a co-creation tradition in evidence-informed policymaking processes.

Background: Co-creation in policymaking is of increasing interest to national governments, and designers play a significant role in its introduction. Aims and objectives: We discuss instances from our fieldwork that demonstrated how UK Policy Lab used design methods to gain insight into the design-oriented methods introduced to policymakers' practices, and how these may influence conventional policy design processes. Methods: This paper reports on the learnings from a two-month participant observation at UK Policy Lab conducted in early 2019. Findings: We found that, beyond human-centred and future-oriented practices, the designers working at this unit appropriate design as a reflective practice for the context of policymaking. We discuss how the use of visual and creative methods of design are utilised by policy designers to facilitate co-creative reflective practices, and how these make a valuable contribution to policymaking practices in UK Government. Discussion and conclusions: As deliberation and decision making is influenced both by what is thought about as well as who is doing the thinking, reflective practices allow notions and assumptions to be unpicked. Moreover, when done as a group activity, reflection leads to a co-production of a deepened understanding of policy challenges.Consequently, we argue, the reflective practices introduced by Policy Lab are an essential contribution to developing a co-creation tradition in evidence-informed policymaking processes Key messages Beyond human-centred and future-oriented methods, UK Policy Lab appropriates design as a reflective practice, to contribute to policymaking by supporting deliberation and decision making. Creative and visual methods from design enable collaborative policymaking processes, as they externalise thinking and surface overlaps and differences among policymakers' perspectives. We argue that design can support the reflective practice of policymakers, highlighting explicit and implicit frames structuring decision making.

AbstractWe consider the findings of a study of the experiences of Postgraduate Researchers with Disabilities and explore how this relates to academic freedom. Drawing upon the provisions of the Public Sector Equality Duty and Indirect Discrimination within the Equality Act (2010), we note that a range of existing public policy practices, such as the operation of the REF, are likely to be in breach of these obligations. We recommend revisions to existing practice that speak more widely to the general concern of academic freedom, suggesting that a consideration of anti‐discrimination law – rather than a purely intellectually focussed agenda – represents a pragmatic means towards shaping the inclusivity of higher education policy going forwards.

In this paper we report on a four-month long field trial of ThoughtCloud, a feedback collection platform that allows people to leave ratings and audio or video responses to simple prompts. ThoughtCloud was trialled with four organisations providing care services for people with disabilities. We conducted interviews with staff and volunteers that used ThoughtCloud before, during and after its deployment, and workshops with service users and staff. While the collection of feedback was high, only one organisation regularly reviewed and responded to collected opinions. Furthermore, tensions arose around data access and sharing, and the mismatch of values between 'giving voice' and the capacity for staff to engage in feedback practices. We contribute insights into the challenges faced in using novel technologies in resource constrained organisations, and discuss opportunities for designs that give greater agency to service users to engage those that care for them in reflecting and responding to their opinions. ; QC 20190916

In recent years there has been an increased focus upon developing platforms for community decision-making, and an awareness of the importance of handing over civic platforms to community organisations to oversee the process of decision-making at a local level. In this paper, we detail fieldwork from working with two community organisations who used our distributed situated devices as part of consultation processes. We focus on some of the mundane and often-untold aspects of this type of work: how questions for consultations were formed, how locations for devices were determined, and the ways in which the data collected fed into decision-making processes. We highlight a number of challenges for HCI and civic technology research going forward, related to the role of the researcher, the messiness of decision making in communities, and the ability of community organisations to influence how citizens participate in democratic processes.

Weight stigma results from the mediatisation of 'obesity': conceptually, a medicalised problem resulting from personal bodily irresponsibility. We undertake a frame analysis of 1452 comments on a thematically related online news article published via The Guardian, about the status of 'obesity' as a disability in European Union (EU) employment law. We identify three themes: (1) weight as a lifestyle choice or disability, (2) weight as an irresponsible choice and (3) weight as a simple or complex issue. We contend that the design of the commenting platform prevents counter-narratives from challenging the dominant ('obesity') framing for three reasons: (1) content is driven by comments appearing earlier in the corpus, (2) the commenting system primarily supports argument between polarised rhetorical positions and (3) the platform design discourages users from developing alternative terminologies for producing counter-narratives. In this way, we explore how weight stigma is propagated through online media, and how users' comments intersect with the affordances of the platform itself.

Recent HCI research has highlighted the potential afforded by maker technologies for supporting new forms of DIY Assistive Technology (DIY-AT) for people with disabilities. Furthermore, the popular discourse surrounding both the maker movement and disability is one of democratisation and empowerment. Despite this, critics argue that maker movement membership lacks diversity and that within DIY-AT, it is seldom the people with disabilities who are creating such designs. We conducted a qualitative study that explored how people with disabilities experience the empowering potential of making. We analysed online videos by makers with disabilities and conducted fieldwork at two makerspaces. These informed the design of DIY-Abilities, a series of workshops for people with disabilities in which participants could learn different maker technologies and complete their own maker project. Through analysis of participants' narratives we contribute a new perspective on the specific social and material capacities of accessible maker initiatives.

The aim of the Unfolding Participation workshop is to outline an agenda for the next 10 years of participatory design (PD) and participatory human computer interaction (HCI) research. We will do that through a double strategy: 1) by critically interrogating the concept of participation (unfolding the concept itself), while at the same time, 2) reflecting on the way that participation unfolds across different participatory configurations. We invite researchers and practitioners from PD and HCI and fields in which information technology mediated participation is embedded (e.g. in political studies, urban planning, participatory arts, business, science and technology studies) to bring a plurality of perspectives and expertise related to participation.

The aim of the Unfolding Participation workshop is to outline an agenda for the next 10 years of participatory design (PD) and participatory human computer interaction (HCI) research. We will do that through a double strategy: 1) by critically interrogating the concept of participation (unfolding the concept itself), while at the same time, 2) reflecting on the way that participation unfolds across different participatory configurations. We invite researchers and practitioners from PD and HCI and fields in which information technology mediated participation is embedded (e.g. in political studies, urban planning, participatory arts, business, science and technology studies) to bring a plurality of perspectives and expertise related to participation.

This paper argues that trust cannot be taken for granted in long-term participatory research and promotes greater consideration to conceptualizing the trusting process as fluid and fragile. This awareness by researchers can reveal to them how the passing of time shapes and reshapes the nature of trusting relationships and their constant negotiation and re-negotiation. The paper draws together literature from different disciplines on the themes of trust, temporality and participatory research and outcomes from interviews and workshops undertaken for The Trust Map project to focus on two key moments that reveal the fragility of trust. These are the subtlety of disruption and trust on trial and trust at a distance. We discuss how trust was built over time through processes of interaction that were continually tested, incremental and participatory.

Trust is an essential if often implicit aspect of co-design particularly when working in community-based, political and sensitive settings. Current co-design literature however remains fairly limited focusing on interactions between people as primary agents of trust. Drawing on research conducted with a poverty alleviation charity based in the UK, we illustrate how trust and distrust can also be mediated through material resources used in the co-design process. The paper highlights the significance of materials in negotiating the interdependencies of trust, in how distrust can be leveraged and trust can be supported through sensitive socio-material exchange conducted with resource limited community organisations.