Abstract
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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Following the recommendations of the Australian Dyslexia Association, in this paper we use the world assessment to indicate what is often indicated by the term “diagnosis”. A focus an assessment drives educational planning and equitable provisions, rather than reinforcing a medical perspective.
References
Bardzell, Shaowen; Jeffrey Bardzell; Jodi Forlizzi; John Zimmerman; and John Antanitis (2012). Critical design and critical theory: the challenge of designing for provocation. In DIS 2012: Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference. New York: ACM Press, pp. 288–297.
Binder, Thomas; Giorgio De Michelis; Pelle Ehn; Giulio Jacucci; Per Linde; and Ina Wagner (2011). Design things. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Björgvinsson, Erling; Pelle Ehn; and Per-Anders Hillgren (2010). Participatory design and “democratizing innovation”. In PDC 2010: Proceedings of the 11th Biennial participatory design conference. New York: ACM Press, pp. 41–50.
Björgvinsson, Erling; Pelle Ehn; and Per-Anders Hillgren (2012). Agonistic participatory design: working with marginalised social movements. CoDesign, vol. 8, nos. 2–3, pp. 127–144.
Bødker, Susanne (2015). Third-wave HCI, 10 years later---participation and sharing. interactions, vol 22, no. 4, pp. 24–31.
Bowker, Geoffrey C.; and Susan Leigh Star (2000). Sorting things out: classification and its consequences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Clement, Andrew; Brenda McPhail; Karen Louise Smith; and Joseph Ferenbok (2012). Probing, mocking and prototyping: participatory approaches to identity infrastructuring. In PDC 2012: Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers. New York: ACM Press. vol.1, pp. 21–30.
Cozza, Michela; and Antonella De Angeli (2005). Infrastructuring Diversity in Stereotypes. In Proceeding of the 5th international workshop on Infrastructures for healthcare (IHC): Patient-centred Care and Patient generated Data, Trento, Italy, pp. 18–19.
De Angeli, Antonella; Silvia Bordin; and María Menéndez Blanco (2014). Infrastructuring participatory development in information technology. In PDC 2014: Proceedings of the 11th Biennial participatory design conference. New York: ACM Press, pp. 11–20.
Dewey, John (1927). The public and its problems: an essay in political inquiry. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press.
DiSalvo, Carl (2009). Design and the Construction of Publics. Design Issues, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 48–63.
DiSalvo, Carl; Jonathan Lukens; Thomas Lodato; Tom Jenkins; and Tanyoung Kim (2014). Making public things: how HCI design can express matters of concern. In CHI 2014: Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems. New York: ACM Press, pp. 2397–2406..
Dunne, Anthony (2008). Hertzian tales: Electronic products, aesthetic experience, and critical design. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Ehn, Pelle (2008). Participation in design things. In PDC 2008: Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Participatory Design. New York: ACM Press, pp. 92–101.
Elliott, Julian; and Elena L. Grigorenko (2014). The dyslexia debate. (Cambridge Studies in Cognitive and Perceptual Development, no. 14). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ferri, Gabriele; Jeffrey Bardzell; Shaowen Bardzell; and Stephanie Louraine (2014). Analyzing critical designs: categories, distinctions, and canons of exemplars. In DIS 2014: Proceedings of the 2014 conference on designing interactive systems. New York: ACM Press, pp. 355–364.
Greenfield, Adam (2013). Against the smart city. New York: Do Projects.
Hillgren, Per-Anders; Anna Seravalli; and Anders Emilson (2011). Prototyping and infrastructuring in design for social innovation. In CoDesign, vol. 7, no. 3–4, pp. 169–183.
Karasti, Helena (2014). Infrastructuring in participatory design. In PDC 2014: Proceedings of the 11th Biennial participatory design conference. New York: ACM Press, pp. 141–150.
Karasti, Helena; and Anna-Liisa Syrjänen (2004). Artful infrastructuring in two cases of community PD. In PDC 2004: Proceedings of the eighth conference on Participatory design: Artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices. New York: ACM Press, pp. 1:20.
Karasti, Helena; and Karen S. Baker (2004). Infrastructuring for the long-term: Ecological information management. In HICSS 2004: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 5–8 January 2004. Los Alamitos, Calif., etc.: IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 10.
Kensing, Finn; and Jeanette Blomberg (1998). Participatory Design: Issues and Concerns. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 7, no. 3-4, pp. 167–185.
Latour, Bruno (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 225–248.
Latour, Bruno (2010). An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto” New Literary History, vol 41, no. 3, pp. 471–490.
Le Dantec, Christopher A. (2016). Designing Publics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Le Dantec, Christopher A.; and Carl DiSalvo (2013). Infrastructuring and the formation of publics in participatory design. Social Studies of Science, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 241–264.
Manzini, Ezio (2015). Design, when everybody designs: an introduction to design for social innovation. (Design Thinking, Design Theory). Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Marres, Noortje (2007). The Issues Deserve More Credit: Pragmatist Contributions to the Study of Public Involvement in Controversy. Social Studies of Science, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 759–780.
Menéndez-Blanco, María; and Antonella De Angeli (2016). “Matters of Concern” as Design Opportunities. In COOP 2016: International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems. London: Springer, pp. 277–293
Menéndez-Blanco, Maria; Pernille Bjørn; and Antonella De Angeli (2017). Critical Design Artefacts and Cooperative Activism. In CSCW 2017: International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing. New York: ACM Press (in press)
Menestrina, Zeno; Michele Bianchi; Adriano Siesser; Raul Masu; and Andrea Conci (2014). OHR. In Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play. New York: ACM Press, pp. 355–358
Parmiggiani, Elena; Eric Monteiro; and Vidar Hepsø (2015). The Digital Coral: Infrastructuring Environmental Monitoring. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 423–460.
Pipek, Volkmar; and Wulf Volker (2009). Infrastructuring: Toward an Integrated Perspective on the Design and Use of Information Technology. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, suppl. Special Issue on e-Infrastructure, vol. 10, no. 5, pp. 447–473.
Pollock, Neil; and Robin Williams (2010). e-Infrastructures: How Do We Know and Understand Them? Strategic Ethnography and the Biography of Artefacts. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 521–556.
Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria (2011). Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social Studies of Science vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 85–106.
Seravalli, Anna (2013). Can design go beyond critique?: Trying to compose together in opening production. Nordes, vol. 1, no. 5, pp. 201–210.
Simonsen, Jesper; and Toni Robertson (2013). Routledge international handbook of participatory design. New York: Routledge.
Star, Susan Leigh (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist vol. 43, no. 3, pp. 377–391.
Star, Susan Leigh; and Karen Ruhleder (1996). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces. Information systems research, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 111–134.
Suchman, Lucy (2002). Located Accountabilities in Technology Production. Scandinavian journal of information systems, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 91–105.
Teli, Maurizio; Silvia Bordin; María Menéndez Blanco, Giusi Orabona, and Antonella De Angeli (2015). Public design of digital commons in urban places: A case study. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 81, pp. 17–30.
Tittarelli, Michele; Patrizia Marti; and Diana Peppoloni (2014). Rapping dyslexia: learning rhythm, rhyme and flow in dyslexic children. In Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational. New York: ACM Press, pp. 865–870.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all the people involved in the project, members of the interAction Lab and ODF Lab at the University of Trento for their contribution to the activities described in this paper. Thanks to Adriano Siesser for the graphic material and to Linda Tonolli for her pictures of the event. Thanks to Dan Britton for letting us use the typefont designed by him (http://danielbritton.info/dyslexia). Finally, thanks to the reviewers for their thoughtful comments which significantly improved earlier versions of this paper. This project has been possible thanks to the funding granted by EIT Digital and by the Ministero dell’Istruzione, Università e Ricerca through the research program ‘Città Educante’, project code CTN01_00034_393801.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Menendez-Blanco, M., De Angeli, A. & Teli, M. Biography of a Design Project through the Lens of a Facebook Page. Comput Supported Coop Work 26, 71–96 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9270-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9270-4