- This is such an exciting session to be in.
So I'm going to present to you today
a version of our paper Designing Speculative Civics
which was authored by myself, Tom Jenkins, and Thomas Lodato
all at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
And what we do in this paper is we present research
through design project,
and we call out three approaches to re-framing
research through design that has to do with time,
the relationship between design research and design time.
And then we call out three themes
to take into consideration in designing
around civics as a context.
The key aspect of this paper, which I'll get to,
is that we really wanted to take the notion
of design led theorizing seriously.
To draw on Gaver's notion of design
as a pre-paradigmatic practice that doesn't begin
with theory but begins with design
and tries to draw theory out of that.
So there's some fantastic overlaps,
when we talk about speculating on civics,
we're doing this in a, we use this phrase
to specifically locate our work in a kind of tradition
and specifically place it against other sorts of practices
in the civic tech field.
So much of civic tech today is really oriented
around instrumental approaches
and instrumental problem solving for things like
communication between citizens and government
and then the development of services
such as apps that enhance that.
This is a crucial thing to do
in contemporary politics and contemporary civics and design,
but it's not actually what we're interested in doing
in this work, instead, we're interested
in placing our work as part of a longer history,
a history alluded to by Mark,
that goes back to ideas that were developed in the 1960s,
from architects and urban planners
who were doing work in collectives
like Superstudio and Archigram
that really saw design as a means
not to necessarily intervene in the civic condition
but as a way to use designer league techniques
to imagine what the consequences
of technologies in those civic conditions might be.
So we really, then, when we talk about speculating on civics
what we are trying to do is contrast our approach
with a lot of the urgency and near-term solutionism
that tends to describe most contemporary civic tech
and we do this by envisioning civic conditions
and then designing around them.
So I want to be very clear that this work
is not about engagement.
We have other projects that are about engagement,
but this work is about our practice as designers
and thinking through that practice.
So there's multiple connections
to the CHI community,
as I was writing these slides I noticed
that it seems like all the connections are in the UK.
I'm sorry about that.
But, connections to the work that's happening
in Digital Civics at Newcastle,
the Sustainable and Connected Cities at UCL and ICL,
and work at places like Interaction Research Studio
with some of the ideas around data and community.
So we situate this as part of, again,
a larger notion of a kind of constructive design research
that's about making things in order
to understand other things.
We're not interested in actually
developing these products or services and
deploying them in the world,
but creating them as a way to understand the conditions,
in this case civics that we want to study.
So again, we can trace this through
ideas of constructive design research
we can take very seriously this notion
of design research as a pre-paradigmatic practice,
a practice that doesn't need theory
to justify its starting points.
And then also look at this as a continuation of an idea
of using public design as a way to articulate issues,
design as a way to draw out what the factors are
of a given issue, and then to explore them.
So we did this through a series of projects
that myself and my collaborators undertook
over the span of multiple years.
Each of these projects was motivated by different questions
and different personal experiences.
And then we came back to these projects
at a certain point to try and find commonalities or themes
out of them that we could use to help us understand
our work, the context of civics, and to generate new ideas.
So, there's three projects that I'm going
to present to you today.
Each of which led to a different notion of civics.
The first is the division of domestic data,
which led to an idea of mediated civics,
the second is a project called data democracy,
which led us to an idea of computed civics,
and the third is drones for foraging,
which led us to an idea of proxied civics.
The division of domestic data was
a research through design project
that was about divorce,
and about the ways
in which divorce is handled
in digital media and digital systems,
or rather the way in which
it is actually not handled,
particularly in the site we were exploring,
which was the case of divorce in the city of Atlanta.
So what the designer did was look at the conditions
of divorce and began to see the ways
in which divorce really changes configurations
of the user and the idea of the user as a single unit
and when that happens,
when divorce happens in a civic context,
what we encounter are a series of rules and regulations
that have to do with the dispersal of property.
So it's interesting to note there are rules and regulations
for who gets the dog, and who gets the car
and who gets the house and who gets the kids,
but there's actually nothing on the books for who gets
the Netflix account, or who gets the Netflix profile.
And the question we wanted to ask was,
how do these systems get mediated,
how do we begin to think about
how these systems have to be redesigned,
how we have to design for this as a kind of civic context,
and what are the ways in which we represent that.
So it's important that we decided
not to design the system itself.
And we characterize this kind of work then as a kind of
design research before design time. We were conducting
our design research before the design of any
actual systems took place, as a way to begin to highlight
what the traces of those systems might be,
what the representation of them might be,
but not the system itself.
So what did we do?
We engaged in one of the most mundane activities
of information design known.
We designed icons.
Hundreds and hundreds of icons
with the idea of asking,
how do we look at common things
such as files and folders and networks
and the activities that take place around them.
And how do we thing about
how those are represented in systems
that have one notion,
one configuration of the user,
and how we have to redesign those
to represent other configurations of the user.
And so what you see here are just some
of the sketches for different kinds
of icons that were meant to represent
things like escrow servers, files that were locked,
files that required mutual review,
files that were requiring untagging,
and we went through systematically
through all these changes of state,
and designed icons for them,
as way of thinking through
what these systems would have to handle.
By thinking through how we would have
to represent those states.
And then we placed those into different contexts
such as for example here, you see icons placed
on what would be a shared Instagram feed,
asking for different activities to take place around them
such as untagging, sharing rights,
and we used this then as a way to think about
how does this change happen,
how would we design around this
and then what does this tell us about the kind
of design of these systems in the near future.
The second project that I'll talk about
is a data democracy project.
And data democracy project really tried
to engage in a lot of the rhetorics around big data
and notions of digital democracy and the ways in which
the digital might enable a kind of,
new kinds of participation.
So what it did was it looked at
sort of the conflation that happens
in neo-liberal tactics around the ways
in which the conditions of business
are conflated with the conditions of citizenship,
and paired that with discussions
that are currently going on about mining
social media as a way to trace affect and preference
and looked at how those get brought together
into a model of what might be a new kind
of direct democracy and the question that
we asked was how do we make possible,
or how do we make this possibility
of a data-driven democracy able to be present
for a kind of material empirical critique
by actually designing a system like that.
So we characterize this as a kind of design research
at design time where the design research
took place through the actual design
of a prototype system that we were trying to inquire into.
So what this system did was, it was a simple web page
in which you could go to, and it asked a question,
sorry you may not be able to see that there
but it asks the question,
how does Atlanta feel about blank.
And you could enter in a search term,
and press submit and then what would be returned is a map
and a graph that began collecting
that information over time so as you submitted the term
what would happen is the system would look
for geo-located tweets within five miles
it would place that contained that keyword
it would place that tweet on a map, and then
preform a simple sentiment analysis.
What became fascinating about this was the way in which
we began to discover slippage in these kinds of systems,
the way in which search on traffic,
we expected to be complaints about,
you know, speeds of I75 or I85,
and instead what we got were complaints about Comcast.
The third project, briefly, is a project
called drones for foraging and drones for foraging
is an ongoing project with a collective in Atlanta called
Concrete Jungles that collects fruits and vegetables
and gives them to those in need as a way
of supplementing local food supply for food shelters,
homeless shelters, other kinds of places.
And the question we were asking with this project
is how could we think of foraging as a kind
of civic service, a means of provisioning
a sort of informal system of care
and how could we imagine how those practices
would get combined with the practices and technologies
of industrial and precision agriculture and logistics.
And this really then became a kind of question about
how do we explore the designing across scales and
ways in which we might appropriate technical practices
and technical systems.
And we characterize this as a different kind
of design research, the kind of design research
after design, where we're not interested in actually
creating the drone itself, but using the drone
as a pre-existing artifact
and designing around it after it's already been created.
So what we did for this project was sort of
common interaction design, we got the drone,
we flew it around the city, we ruined lots of pear trees
as we flew the drone into them,
we tried to figure out, we did basic usability testing
with this, is this really viable, what would this look like,
how might this happen, and we began testing
different kinds of software to think about
how we might use existing off-the-shelf tools
to do things like spot pears on a tree and count them.
And this really became a way of us exploring
the possibilities of what might be by bringing
these two spaces and practices together
and by thinking about how these technologies move
across scale to enable new kinds of civic systems.
So each of these projects was conducted
and it was conducted as a way,
not to produce a final working version
of the system, but to give us something
that we could reflect upon, to give us something
that we could use to think back,
because the question that was really motivating us was not
how to build sentiment analysis, was not
how to make drones work, was not really how
to build systems to manage digital property in divorce,
the questions that were really motivating us were
how do we understand civics in the 21st century,
and how do we use the kinds of designerly activities
that we are involved in to shape
the kinds of interpretations and opportunities
that we are going to provide for ourselves
to design within.
And again, we did this through
a very sort of systematic process,
which is, I have no idea how it falls
in the problem solving domain,
but we can talk about that later.
But a systematic process of first imagining civic conditions
like what are these conditions, what are the conditions
of divorce, what are the conditions of data democracy.
Designing for those conditions
reflecting on our design things.
And here, really taking, owning our background as scholars
within the humanities and doing kind of
collective and collaborative close reading
of our projects together over time
and then stepping back from that and asking ourselves,
how does this make us think about civics differently.
So from this we came up with three themes about civics
which I want to touch on briefly
and we use these themes as both ways
to analyze and characterize our own work
and we believe as generative frames
for producing new RTD projects.
So the first is a kind of what we called
mediated civics and we drew this from the project
on the division of domestic labor
where in this case civics is really about regulation
and procedure with regards to rights.
And then what you see in this is that
ordinary activities that have nothing at all
to do with civics initially,
saving a file, deleting a file, tagging a file,
are mediated into activities with civic significance
as the relationship between the parties involved changed.
And so what this means is that implications for design
is that we need to think about the ways in which
design systems at one and the same time work
to arbitrate the relationships between individuals
and work on behalf of the state
to constitute and decompose what counts as a civic unit.
And the challenge then, is to really think
about how the categories of citizenship,
how different kinds of civic identities
are multiple and dynamic and the ways in which we need
to develop corresponding complexity
in our computational systems.
The second idea is what we call computed civics
and in many ways this is a common thing
to most of us, this is the way in which
you see civics, more often than not.
Being talked about particularly in discussions
around smart cities and things like that.
Well you begin to see a shift from not about being about
the quantified self to the idea of the quantified community,
and civics then are reduced to those events
and phenomenon that can be traced
and represented computationally.
And if we think about theories of civics
that already exist, and if we bring design experience
to these theories that already exist,
in some ways we are moving from Schudson's notion
of the informed citizen to the idea of the citizen
as information.
So the implications for this for design
is that we have to rethink the way
in which we deal with publics.
Which are a topic for importance for many of us
in HCI and design in participatory design.
And what happens here is that publics
are still issue oriented,
but they are also at the same time
information oriented. Publics are defined in part
in large part, in the ways they are constructed
from data, meta-data and their attributes.
And what becomes interesting is that
issues matter, but issues matter only to the extent
by which they are marked by data and
can be computationally tractable.
The final category of civics that we came up with
we drew from our drones foraging project
which was an idea of what we called proxied civics.
So proxied civics are civics where
government and governmentality is enabled
by extra-state services.
And you see two common trends of this,
one, you see this sort of normal trend of outsourcing
and you also see this in activities such as
what Megan Boler or Matt Ratto have called DIY Citizenship.
Where civics is actually now hybrid, and we have
to think about it as a combination and and interweaving
of informal and formal systems of care.
And in this case, systems and devices play
an important role to the extent
that they thwart different modes of action between publics.
So these implications is when we think about activities
and material participation, the ways in which
we participate in contemporary politics and civics.
It's not simply through construction
or making anew, but also through activities of
imaginative use, re-use, and appropriation.
And as designers this makes us think about the ways
in which material participation happens,
not simply through the invention of products and services
but through practices of infra-structuring,
of connecting others together.
So by way of conclusion,
what we hope to do in this talk is,
and in the paper much more fully,
is to begin to show how we can use
RTD as a way to articulate
civic conditions and consequences
and the ways in which we can use the kinds of prototypes
that we created by thinking about different notions
of design time, design research before design,
design research at design time,
design research after design,
as different ways of either creating traces
of systems, functional systems,
or the imaginative use of existing systems,
and that the themes that emerge
from this design led practice can be useful
for both understanding our work,
and for generating new ideas.
So I want to be the first to acknowledge
there are serious limitations with our approach here,
in large part has to do with who we are
in imagining civics, we are imagining civics
from a primarily western democratic perspective
amongst three men of various ages of youth
it fits our norms.
If we really want to take this approach seriously
we need to expand our ideas of what civics are
and think about civics from different perspectives
but we hope that one of the key things
that comes out of this paper is the value
of a design-led theorize, and the value
of really taking seriously this notion
of design research as a pre-paradigmatic theory,
which doesn't need to lead with what ideas
of civics might be, but instead, through design,
can generate its own notions of what civics are
and the role of design within those practices.
Thank you.
(applause)
- (Questioner #1) I'm going to put my radio back in
I think I'm going to ask you a very stupid question
I got the impression, and I hope I'm wrong,
and I hope you'll tell me exactly how I'm wrong,
that the designers were designing at,
thinking about a civic, through the motions
of technologies and systems, and I wasn't sure
who got to be a designer, and I wasn't sure
where the people were in the designed at things
and please tell me I'm wrong.
- No, you're right and at,
you're right. We approached this as a project
that was undertaken by three people
who are professional design researchers,
for lack of a better term, and that's why
we are very clear in the paper and I want to be clear here,
this is, you know, a lot of our work actually is
community based PD, this is not that work.
This is work in which we are making a strong claim
that designers acting as designers through this kind of
exploratory work on their own can actually produce
theoretical insights.
So this isn't to say that there isn't
the opportunity and the need to work with others
but that there is also an opportunity
to work as designers alone.
- (Questioner #1) Thank you. I guess I'm hoping that
next year you'll tell us about
that work with others. Thanks.
- Yes. See you at PD.
- (Questioner #2) Thanks, Tapam Parikh at the UC Berkeley.
So I have a question, do you think what you're doing
right now, as a form of civics, giving this talk,
writing this paper, is that a form of civics,
and if it is, how does it relate to the other forms
of civics that are situated in another