Hello and thank you for watching this presentation. My name is Max
Krüger and i will give you a short overview of our paper.
Even though I appear alone in this video I have written it together with my colleagues
Anne Weibert from Germany, Débora de Castro Leal from Brazil, Dave Randall from the UK
and Volker Wulf from Germany, and all of us work at the University of Siegen in Germany.
As you can guess from the title this paper deals with the sustainability of collaborative
or participatory design projects that develop systems or applications to support social change.
But what happens when such a project ends? How are we going to make sure that the system we
developed can continue to be used in the future? With our paper we try to address this question.
To do this we report on our own research and design project, with which we tried to make
it easier for forced and precarious migrants in Germany to make themselves at home in this
new country and overcome the various and often severe hurdles that they face in this process.
For three years we have worked in two cities in Germany on co-designing digital tools. For
this we collaborated with forced migrants as well as their voluntary and professional supporters.
The tools we developed together address issues ranging from difficulties of finding
suitable local language classes, finding work or opportunities to continue one's education,
or accessing healthcare. In both locations the tools are used regularly but in different ways.
The funding for the project ended in October 2019, after three years. With that also ended
our availability to engage in the project in a more or less full-time capacity
as we have been doing until that moment. But since then these tools have been maintained
in both cities by a mixture of voluntary and professional efforts with only minimal
involvement of ourselves and are kept usable. We are obviously very happy about this outcome,
but how did this happen? To find an answer we draw on a lot of literature from within HCI
but also on Feminist conceptualizations of Care as expressed by Joan Tronto or Maria Puig de la
Bellacasa. The paper basically gives three answers to the question. One is that we managed to expand
pre-existing care. On the slide right now you see an often cited definition of care,
offered by Joan Tronto and her colleague Berenice Fisher, which we think very well
describes what we observed in the volunteers and professional supporters that we worked with,
who are the most important actors for the ongoing maintenance. These collaborators clearly care for
forced migrants and the challenges that they face. For some it was a lifelong commitment.
For some it was highly ideologically motivated, for others more professionally. It involves a
large variety of activities such as giving advice or accompanying people to administrative offices,
translating letters or just being friends, having dinner together. So in our project we build on
this existing care, finding ways to incorporate the different forms of care into the project.
The tools we develop support the activities of the supporters and because they care about
people and the difficulties they face, this care then expanded to the tools and the maintenance of
these tools. The project became what Bellacasa calls a "Matter of Care" and our collaborators
felt ownership and a sense of responsibility for the becoming of these tools. As i said we have
several other answers. Another crucial aspect is the openness to include social complexity
and the continuously evolving cast of actors into the project, as well as flexibility regarding the
activities and goals of the project, which were adapted as the project evolved. To know more you
would have to read the paper. I'd like to close by pointing out some limitations though. One is, that
even though care was crucial for our project and for the maintenance, it is not unproblematic. It
creates hierarchies and sometimes even something that could be characterized as oppression,
as other authors have also mentioned. We write in more detail about that elsewhere, but for the sake
of this paper this is one of the several reasons for why migrants are only minimally involved in
the continued maintenance of the tools, even if they were crucial and close participants.
The other thing I'd like to highlight is that the ongoing maintenance of our tool is obviously
great, but it in reality it is only a tiny element of the social change that our project aimed for
of overcoming the injustices forced migrants face in Germany. What is needed, in our view for this,
is more of the crucial care work our collaborators engage in as well as political change in the EU
and its member states to facilitate migration, rather than trying so hard to prevent it.
Our contribution in this sense can only be a tiny one. Thank you for listening