this paper reports on our efforts to
design
with trust in a two-year design
ethnography
with the city of atlanta's office of
immigrant affairs
in our local city government the
research question in this paper that we
explore is how should we understand
designing
technology with trust in the civic space
as is now designing with trust is
dominated by neoliberal
logic which narrowly interprets
criterias and ideas
for trust through efficiency and
transactionality
this logic obscures how design might
pursue trust in use cases that involve
the complex
normative and internally agonistic
dimensions of civic life in urban
environments
issues such as gentrification structural
racism
and economic inequality which are all
not reducible to clicks or swipes
so in this paper we argue against
neoliberal logic's interpretation of
trust and provide a counter logic
when that is a relational and center's
designing with trust
around the social psychological concept
of distance
we call this framework distance
and trust and we applied it in a
two-year
design ethnography with our city's
department of immigrant affairs
in this work we focused on how the
office
was working to assist
immigrant communities specifically
hispanic immigrant communities
overcome their distance in their
relationships
with the city as it pertains to
addressing housing code violations
we used our framework to inform the
design
of a socio-technical system called code
enforcer
which was designed to aid immigrant
affairs ongoing efforts to help these
communities get repairs and maintenance
of their living spaces
so code enforcer will allow the office
to monitor and assist
residents interactions with property
managers and the city's code enforcement
process
to design that system with trust
the framework trust is distance
introduces these concepts of trust
process stages of initiating
building and retaining and sensitizing
concepts
which help guide the design process of
the system
according to the needs of trust in the
space
in the paper we articulate how each of
these concepts
inform the design of different
components of the system
how history for instance informs the
graphic design and information
of the paper code guide pamphlets how
notions of experience guide the specific
user interface components of the system
how expectations can be mediated and set
and finally
how interactive features in the system
can preserve
trust
in the end what the system tries to do
is bring these communities closer to
governance as it means to addressing
this specific issue
of housing code violations the system
has this paper component that is about
meeting distal communities where they
are
acknowledging their lived experiences
developing relationships with them
as a way to increase their knowledge and
ability to act through forming civic
relationships
in the grand scheme of things the system
symbolically represents
one attempt at closing the social
distance between the city and this
communities
and ideally in the office's mind and our
own
we hope the success of closing distance
in this one specific area of civic life
would lead immigrant communities
feeling closer to their government and
more likely to engage in other aspects
of civic life
while we did find our framework of trust
as distance
did inform designing this technology
with trust
it also created tensions in the design
space
specifically around how we understand
the underlying philosophy
of designing with trust specifically
the tensions in making trust more
efficient
and the questions of delegating the
human work of meeting people where they
are to technology
while we are not able to resolve these
tensions
in the current work we hope that this
paper opens up a space
for critical engagement within the kai
community
specifically within the space of digital
civics on how we understand
the role of trust in civic relationships
thank you