PDC 2016 WORKSHOP - Migration of a sharing platform from Copenhagen to Aarhus

GIVE&TAKE DESIGNATHON
In this full-day workshop we set up a designathon to collaboratively explore a practical hands-on attempt to make a social innovation, a design outcome from the project Give&Take (www.givetake.eu), ‘travel’ from Copenhagen and Vienna to Aarhus. Give&Take is a PD project funded under the EU’s AAL programme (2014-2017) with partners from Denmark, Austria and Portugal. In Give&Take we explore the potential of exchanging non-monetary services among senior citizens in a municipality within Copenhagen and in local senior communities in Vienna. In Give&Take private companies, co-design researchers, a municipality, and citizens collaborate to develop a digital platform that can support exchange within communities of senior citizens. The current version of our platform is brought to the workshop where we invite potential local stakeholders and workshop attendees to participate in a designathon to explore how this social innovation can be appropriated in the local setting of Aarhus.

TO PARTICIPATE
To participate, please submit a 1 page (max) statement (of visuals/text or other media equivalent) to PDsocialinnovationsWS (* a t *) gmail.com including information on: A) why you are interested in community oriented PD work and B) a specific example of how an idea / innovation travelled from one setting to another.

BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION
Already at the 2002 PDC conference, the need to understand participation outside typical (Western) PD research settings was noted [2]. It has since been established that PD approaches do not necessarily travel well, but need to be appropriated to new settings [4]. This full-day workshop applies a local perspective on how social innovations can travel, by bringing a prototype digital platform from an ongoing PD research project in Copenhagen and Vienna, to a ‘designathon’ (inspired by the term ‘hackathon’) where local stakeholders and workshop participants collaboratively can explore how the current design can ‘travel’ to a new (municipal) setting within Denmark. We envision this exploration to include for example designing new community structures and processes for engaging in this sort of sharing platform and suggesting recommended changes to the technical platform to support this new setting. New opportunities for working with Participatory Design (PD) has given rise to community-based PD as a recently emerging field [3]. In order to handle the unbounded, open nature of these settings, a reformation of PD thinking has been suggested (e.g. [1]); acknowledging heterogeneity and conflicts of interest, and new forms of participation and engagement. In this line of thinking, infrastructure and infrastructuring have emerged as central concepts in a process, foregrounding the on-going appropriation between different contexts with many different stakeholders and practice. This also highlights design as a continuous activity, blurring the border between design and use. As researchers we promote dissemination of local social innovations to other communities, but we can also expect challenges when a social innovation co-designed in one setting ‘travels’ to a new setting. Even when the target setting is within the same (national) culture, and with the same categories of stakeholders, we should expect diverse community-specific practices and cultures (e.g. between different professional teams at a workplace).

REFERENCES
[1] Bannon, L. and Ehn, P. 2012. Design: design matters in Participatory Design. in Simonsen, J. and Robertson, T. eds. Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, Routledge, New York, 37-63.

[2] Binder, T., Gregory, J. and Wagner, I. (eds). 2002. Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference. Malmö, Sweden.

[3] DiSalvo, C., Clement, A., and Pipek. V. 2012. Communities: Participatory Design for, with and by communities. in Simonsen, J. and Robertson, T. eds. Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, Routledge, New York, 182–209.

[4] Elovaara, P., Teddy Igira, F. and Mörtberg, C. 2006. Whose participation? whose knowledge?: exploring PD in Tanzania-Zanzibar and Sweden. In Proc. of the ninth conference on Participatory design - Volume 1, Trento, Italy, ACM, New York, NY, DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1147261.1147277.