- So here we go.
Hello everyone.
So, I'm Clara from Open Lab in Newcastle University.
And today I'm gonna tell you about
a year long engagement.
Working with a community of residents
and a housing organization in an estate
undergoing urban regeneration in southeast London.
First off, I'd like to thank my cohorts,
Alex, Vassilis, Rob, Bettina, Pete,
as well as the residents
and the regeneration team with whom we worked.
So, HCI has long been concerned with
the role of design and computing place making.
For example, through support and deliberative processes.
Or processes of story sharing towards the formation of
collective identities.
So with this work, we asked ourself,
how might HCI support processes of community building
in urban renewal context where the social,
political and economic practices that constitute place,
are inevitably multiple and contested.
So I'm going to tell you a little bit
about the political landscape of urban renewal projects.
Which, in the UK and in the global north,
are increasingly driven by policy promoting social mixing.
Where mixed tendency programs are seen as a way to tackle
social economic decline and promote sustainable community.
In the UK, these are translated in programs favoring
a market based model over social needs.
So it's backed by these trends.
It's a regeneration program of the estate we engaged in.
So the Palarole estate was spending the 1970s
and comprised seven tower blocks,
like the one you're seeing on the pictures there.
But suffered a major decline in the 1980s
becoming famed in the UK
for crime and deprivation.
So, the regeneration then,
was really driven by desire
to build a better place and sustainable community.
By reconfiguring the estate
both materially and socially.
This basically involved the change
of the name of the estate;
increase the number of family housing;
and decrease the number of social housing
to introduce affordable and housing for sale.
The regeneration also involved the program to
engage residents in activities
to influence the design of the new estate,
as well as social activities to create a sense of community.
So as part of these activities
the residents wanted to create a digital walking trail,
narrating sites of historical significance
around their estate.
So having experimented with the process
to support the city residents
making issue based digital walking trails in the past,
we were invited to support the residents in their process.
So the context, basically, presented a complex interplay
between actors and ideas of place.
Where, despite its good intention,
actually the regeneration ended up introducing
peculiarly singular ideas
of what may constitute place and community.
So with this work we set out to experiment
with the potential for material interventions
and participatory processes,
to bring together the multiple actors
and practices, social and institutional, for example,
and open up spaces for plural account of place
towards the re-making of the estate
and its communities.
So over the course of twelve months
we worked closely with the regeneration engagement officer
and seven residents of the housing estate.
The process developed through
a series of initial engagements;
the design and use of a social technical system,
and a curatorial activity to allocate
and distribute stories in place.
So initially we experimented with a process
called City Walk,
which I presented last year here at CHI.
The process basically entails groups going for walks
and recording placed-based narrative
using digital devises, maps and prompt cards.
We also generated some publicity material
to advertise
the walks and invite others to join in.
However, over this time, it emerged the stressful
and emotionally loaded period residents were going through.
Packing their belongings and watching
their home being demolished.
So because of this the process of engaging others
in walks around the estate proved very difficult.
Also, issues with the promotional material
came to the fore,
as the housing communication team initially
didn't see them, or saw them sort of deviating
from their official branding and regulations.
But above all the residents spoke to us
about wanting to grow their community,
wanting to find value in their past,
and announce what they already had.
So with these issues in mind,
we designed a social technical system
that we called digital travelling suitcases
for prompting and recording stories.
So given the group low literacy and digital skills
the cases were designed to make the story-telling process
as accessible as possible.
The cases aimed at supporting residents,
engaging others in the estate,
encouraging reciprocity through a process
of asking and giving, as well as greater control
over who should be invited to contribute
a story and how.
So residents, for example, could pick a story prompt,
or write their own from a box underneath there,
then record their story and share it on the case
or online.
So given issues with wireless connection,
due to the regeneration, the cases then contain
a GSM phone that connected to an interactive
voice response system,
allowing the upload and access of content, also online.
Participants were then invited to attribute
a story to places on the estate
using a message style, containing and envelope,
over there, then place it on top of the case
and tie it to the previous card.
Finally, they were invited to chose
someone in the neighbourhood using this cube,
pick a story prompt for them,
and then pass the suitcase onto them.
So in this way the suitcase would travel
person to person on the estate,
mapping out the relation in the neighbourhood.
Above all, the cases were really designed to convey
what people valued about the estate
and show the diversity of these values.
So four cases were introduced in the estate
via four members of our working group of residents,
and traveled for about a month.
And these were handed over to all the new residents,
members of the regeneration team,
and housing officers, for example.
In total 35 stories were collected
through the cases and our initial engagements.
These were then discussed in a curatorial activity,
and allocated to different sites across the estate.
The activity also included the design of a walk-guide
and experimenting with graffiti in and around the estate,
unique numbers to access the interactive responsive system,
listen, and download your content on location.
So the insights
in the paper,
cover the data collected across all of these activities
including all your stories, discussions,
workshops and interviews.
Where we consider how the suitcases operated
to support the sharing of different understanding
of life on the estate,
and how that sharing offers some powerful insights
that we can learn from.
So I won't be able to show the complexities that emerged
over this process,
but for detail feel free to have a look at the paper.
So yeah, um...
The residents came to see the cases as a sort of prop.
Showing what they were doing in the community.
But using them also reflected the slow process
that building confidence and engaging others
actually demands.
The intervention also came to surface
some real struggles between the housing organisational
and indeed political strategy,
and their genuine attempt to engage with the residents.
The suitcases here offered opportunities
to reflect on or reassess,
institution and residents' relations.
And on screen here is a housing officer
reflecting on this upon receiving one of the cases.
So the cases also nurture the process of gifting.
They created intimate moments between
the giver and the taker.
It also fostered the process of discovery and reflection,
where issues were related to larger political contexts
and assumptions about the estate were unsettled.
For example, in the quote up here,
a participant expresses utter surprise
to hear positive stories about past life
in the estate.
Throughout the process then,
each residence developed it's own vision, if you like,
for the digital train.
Some were keen to counter mainstream media
negative portrayal of the estate by actively seeking
alternative version of life on the estate.
For others though, recounting difficult, or sad episodes
became something to bevalue.
To resist homogeneous and perhaps deceptive notions
of perfect places and instead open spaces for improvement.
As in this quote here,
a participant suggests.
So the cases then overall,
generated lots of enthusiasm among both
residents and the regeneration team.
So much so that the manager showcased one of them
at the housing institution general meeting.
This though, surprisingly perhaps,
provoked concerns among residents
over the ownership of the suitcases and the content.
Here then, a participant in fact says,
well it's a residents thing, and I think its us
who should decide which stories go on there
and whether it's good or bad.
Okay so, heading towards the end of the presentation,
I'm just going to briefly highlight
a couple of points from our discussion.
The cases then, with their material presence,
appeared to support the expression of value
and, we think, offered ways to cultivate relations.
Also, they allowed residents to organise
participatory spaces in different and emerging ways.
What this showed us, then,
is the potential for digital artifact
to support meaning making in civic affairs,
and reconfigure spaces that can
expressly redistribute participation.
So authors have actually long advocated
for an understanding of places as enacted
through a multiplicity of practices,
and what we show here is our attempt,
or is one way in which these can be brought together
through material means.
So for us, residents concerns
over the ownership of the cases
actually spoke to us about the importance
of safeguarding spaces for critical reflection
where different practices can be understood
in relation to one another,
in order to work out what place and community
might become rather than what it is.
Our challenge here then,
is not to cement oppositional ground,
but actually keep the different story going
and enable ways in which these can be made sense of
as tied to one another and productively worked with.
To conclude then, our insights,
points towards an understanding of places
as always becoming configurations
of communal life.
Here then, the technologies and interventions we might make
can only be part of these ongoing processes.
This study showed us the extent to which
existing configuration of space
have significant implication for the way
places are understood and then made.
We think HCI can play a significant role
in reconfiguring and redistributing
participatory spaces through material means.
They can put institutional and social practices
in dialogue with one another,
and renew, in this way, the processes that make
and remake the places that matter to us.
Thank you.
(applause)
- [Audience Member] Okay, yeah, do I start talking?
I'm Tappin Perick, UC Berkeley.
So uh, thanks for a great presentation.
I was curious about the design choice to use a suitcase
as opposed to like what might have been the other approach
to just have a phone number and put up billboards.
So I'm just wondering why the materiality, physical,
instantiateion of the suitcase,
and then also the role of the people
who were entrusted with those suitcases
in potentially mediating the interaction.
- Uh, yeah, the first bit of the question is,
basically when I started working,
because of the regeneration a lot of the residents
that were there didn't really think their story
had any value whatsoever.
Obviously there is,
there was a process of devaluing of
not just the material fabric of the regeneration
but actually everything that went with it.
Therefore my life and my stories.
And so the suitcases were, if you like, a symbolic way
to bring back, or to convey, in fact,
the idea that actually their story had value.
The second half, I don't remember it.
- [Tappin] Just the role of the people
who you gave to suitcases to.
What role did they play in mediating the interaction.
- So the suitcases were designed for them to use
in a way, I worked closely with them for a while,
and then we designed the suitcases,
and then I handed over to them,
so they used them, they passed it on to someone else,
and then to someone else, and so.
If that makes sense.
- [Jofish Kaye] I wanted to follow up,
this is Jofish Kaye, Yahoo research, Yahoo.
I wanted to follow up on Tappins's question,
And think about the metrics of success.
I believe you said there were 36 stories gathered,
is that right?
- Yes.
- [Jofish] And I wonder what that story,
what that number represents, right.
In the context of Tappin's question,
in that, I'm sure it took more than 36 hours
to assemble all of those suitcases right,
and if you say well, we got 36 stories out of this,
would it have been better to spend that time,
rather than building the material artifact,
going around and interviewing people, right?
- Yeah, I think a material artifact, how I said,
how I designed it for, it was a tool for them to engage
their neighbourhood.
And so the number of stories
in terms of the metric of success,
I consider myself a participant in this study,
so I guess each one of the people who participated
the participants, the regeneration team,
will tell you something different about
what was successful about this project.
In terms of quantification or number of stories,
that's definitely quite low,
at the bottom of the success,
it didn't really matter, almost.
So, yes, I could've interviewed
but it's not my way of working,
so it's a piece of action research, this.
So the suitcase was a tool that was made
to support them in, in engaging others.
- [Becky Michealson] Hi, my name's Becky Michaelson
I'm from the engagement lab at Emerson College.
The director of our lab, Eric Gordon talks about
meaningful inefficiencies as opposed to
a lot of civic technology which is
very focused on efficiency so this is
a great example of that, very beautiful work.
I was wondering if you could speak
a little bit more about the stake holders
or the audience of the stories
because clearly it's meaningful for the participants
to share the stories for themselves
and among each other, but I'm wondering if there are other
audiences like urban planners or people that
find value and listen to those stories also.
- Yes, so I did mention, maybe I was talking very fast,
but I did mention how, through the process they engaged
the housing officer and the regeneration team.
So when I was working there with them,
literally the estate was a building site.
So that's when the intervention took place.
Also the housing officers and the regeneration team
as well as new people coming in the new part of the estate,
sort of were engaged with the suitcases,
if that makes, yeah. So there was quite a,
quite a broad audience,
interactive if you like, with the suitcases
and therefore listened to the stories.
(applause)