Article

Participatory design in community computing contexts: tales from the field

Authors:

Cecelia B. Merkel,

Craig H. Ganoe,

John M. Carroll,

Mary Beth RossonAuthors Info & Claims

PDC 04: Proceedings of the eighth conference on Participatory design: Artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices - Volume 1

Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/1011870.1011872

Published: 27 July 2004 Publication History

Abstract

As technology becomes more embedded in our daily lives, there is a great deal of hope about the use of information technology to achieve positive community outcomes like increasing access to local information, promoting civic engagement, and creating avenues for collaboration and communication. While these technologies provide opportunities for community groups to achieve their own goals, most community computing studies describe community members in fairly passive ways as users of existing systems rather than as meaningful contributors to the design process. The Civic Nexus project is a three year participatory design project that involves working with community groups to increase their capacity to solve local community problems through the use of leading edge computing tools. Our view of participatory design is one in which community members take control of the design process in terms of both directing what should be done and maintaining the technology infrastructure. In this paper, we describe our process of participatory design with three community groups and present associated challenges for designers engaging in participatory design in community computing contexts.

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Index Terms

Participatory design in community computing contexts: tales from the field
1. Information systems
  1. World Wide Web
    1. Web applications
      1. Internet communications tools
2. Social and professional topics

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PDC 04: Proceedings of the eighth conference on Participatory design: Artful integration: interweaving media, materials and practices - Volume 1

July 2004

245 pages

ISBN:1581138512

DOI:10.1145/1011870

Conference Chairs:
Andrew Clement
University of Toronto, Canada
,
Peter van den Besselaar
NIWI, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Netherlands

Copyright © 2004 ACM.

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Published: 27 July 2004

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