We welcome nominations for the 11th Artful Integrators Award, to be presented in person in Sibu during PDC 2024. The Award is intended to recognize outstanding achievement in the area of participatory design of information and communications technologies. Where traditional design awards have gone to individual designers and singular objects, the Artful Integrators Award emphasizes the importance of collaborative participation in design, and a view of good design as the effective alignment of diverse collections of people, practices and artifacts.

The award will go to a group of people who together have worked out, in an exceptionally creative way, new forms of participation in design. While no single element of a design might be particularly extraordinary in itself, the combination of design processes and resulting possibilities will be.

The group that wins the award will receive:

• A fully sponsored attendance for 1 representative to PDC2024 in Sibu, Malaysia covering conference registration, travel and accommodation. 

Selection Procedure

As this is the first time PDC is being hosted in Southeast Asia, we would like to encourage nominations from the region. Echoing the conference theme, we are particularly interested in projects and initiatives that focus on growing new alliances with research communities, stakeholders and practitioners that allow for a structured exchange to inform change initiatives.

We will evaluate the received nominations and reach a consensus regarding the awardee for 2024. Our evaluative criteria include the following:

1. What are the core values of the work they do? What is the change that they see themselves making and how?
2. What kind of participation does their work allow/encourage/build? How is what they do sustainable, ethical and just? Is that an aim for the designers or the participants?
3. What makes us see the work that they do as artful?
4. How is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? Does the work propose creative new forms of participation, even if the final product is not (yet) fully realized?

Nomination Procedure

Nominations are to be submitted via this online form no later than the 29th of April 2024. The nomination should include the following:

1. Name of the organization/group of nominees
2. URL or other on-line references
3. One paragraph description about the organization or group 
4. Two paragraph motivation on why they should receive the award (addressing the evaluation criteria)

Previous Awardees

The first Artful Integrators Award was presented at PDC 2004 to the Global Fund for Women for their ongoing grant-making infrastructure development.

The second Artful Integrators Award was presented at PDC 2006 to the Health Information Systems Programme (HISP) initiative, for promoting participatory design within an on-going international research & development collaboration in health information systems for public health and higher education.

The third Artful Integrators Award was presented at PDC 2008 to the ACTION for Health initiative, for its commitment to the integration of research with health system design and development, through an extensive and continuous network of research partnerships.

The fourth Artful Integrators Award was presented at PDC 2010 to the Teaching from Country Project designed to support distance education in reverse by Aboriginal Yoljnu knowledge authorities.

The fifth Artful Integrators Award was presented at PDC 2012 to Siida: Playing the past, battling for the future, for the participatory design of a multiplayer online game based in Saami/The High North, with the intention to promote justice for indigenous people and their places.

The sixth Artful Integrators Award was presented at PDC 2014 to two awardees: The Gender Research in Africa into ICTs for Empowerment (GRACE) Network has demonstrated its commitment to research-based intervention approaching gender-based injustice with the aim of prevention, attempting to engage root causes rather than only remediation. The Reconstructed Living Labs (RLabs), a community based initiative that has dedicated their efforts to reconstruct the lives, livelihoods, and possibilities for flourishing of youth, through their involvement in learning about, and involving others in, the transformative use of ICT.

The seventh Artful Integrators Award was presented at PDC 2016 to Malmö Living Labs for its efforts to democratize innovation in the areas of sustainable urban development, social innovation, and design.

The eighth Artful Integrators Award was presented at PDC 2018 to The De Voorkamer Initiative, a centre that supports asylum seekers and helps them to find work and connections, and The Other Market, which prototypes alternative (work) futures for the city of Genk. Both seek to provide opportunities for marginalized groups and to contribute to social integration, distributing agency and benefits across many stakeholders.

The ninth Artful Integrators Award was presented at PDC 2020 to CatalyticAction : a design studio that works to empower communities through strategic and innovative spatial interventions, launched in the UK, but constituted from local players wherever they are working. Special mention was also given to Mending the New: A Framework for Reconciliation Through Testimonial Digital Textiles in the Transition to Post-Conflict Rural Colombia: a project that creatively acknowledges the trauma that needs healing in remote areas of Colombia, using textiles to work with memory and reconciliation.

The tenth Artful Integrators Award was presented at PDC 2022 to two deserved winners both located in South Africa. Basetana Magoro, Mamaila Community Network Project aims to provide affordable internet access to community members in South Africa. Mamaila is a cluster of six villages in the Greater Letaba Municipality, made up of more than 20,000 people and where over 50% of the population are not economically active and only 22% percent are employed, according to the Internet Society. The 2nd winner, Carlos Baca, Techio Comunitario and National Schools Community Network is a project that promotes grassroots communities’s digital inclusion by sharing knowledge and thinking together how to build and strengthen community networks.

We are now looking for our 11th winner. 

Please get in touch by emailing us at artfulintegration@pdc2024.org if you have any questions. We look forward to you joining us in Sibu.

Artful Integrators’ Award chairs

• Joyce Yee (Northumbria University, UK)
• Lale Dilbas (Yasar University, Turkey)