PDC 2024 Workshops
- Full Day Workshops will take place on the 12th of August from 0900hrs to 1630hrs.
- Half Day workshops will take place on the 15th of August from 1330hrs to 1700hrs.
Accepted Full Day Workshops
Title: Envisioning Collaborative Futures: Advancing the Frontiers of Embedded Research.
Organisers: Anna Carter, Kyle Montague, Reem Talhouk, Ana Henriques, Hugo Nicolau, Tiffany Knearem, Ceylan Besevli, Firaz Peer, Clara Crivellaro, and Sarah Rüller
Format: Full Day, Hybrid
Workshop website: https://dcitizens.eu/envisioning-collaborative-futures-pdc-2024/
Workshop description:
Participatory design initiatives, especially within the realm of digital civics, are often integrated and codeveloped with the very citizens and communities they intend to assist. Digital civics research aims to create positive social change using a variety of digital technologies. These research projects commonly adopt various embedded processes, such as commissioning models. Despite the adoption of this process within a range of domains, there isn’t currently a framework for best practices and accountability procedures to ensure we engage with citizens ethically and ensure the sustainability of our projects. This workshop aims to provide a space to start collaboratively constructing a dynamic framework of best practices, laying the groundwork for the future of sustainable embedded research processes. The overarching goal is to foster discussions and share insights that contribute to developing effective practices, ensuring the longevity and impact of participatory digital civics projects.
We ask participants to prepare a short statement, or pictorial (maximum 1 page) that includes a short description of what digital civics research means to them, their relevant professional and/or research practice in a maximum of 200 words and a motivation statement related to their interest in the workshops motivations, in a maximum of 500 words.
Please email your submission to Anna Carter at: Anna.r.l.carter@northumbria.ac.uk
Title: Selling durian online? Reimagining digital marketplaces that embody and empower rural businesses.
Organizers: Yang Bong, Lewis Cameron, Gary Loh Chee Wyai, Stanley Macarthy, and John Harvey
Format: Full Day, In-Person Only
Workshop website: https://reimaginingdigitalmarketplaces.godaddysites.com
Workshop description:
Digital commerce offers entrepreneurs opportunities to access the global economy, while also threatening to push them out of business. In an increasingly digital world, ensuring the sustainable digitalisation of commerce, especially for marginalised groups is becoming ever more important.
This workshop examines how participatory design processes can address issues of digital inclusion for digitally marginalised groups within the context of digital commerce, while investigating its potential in fostering dialogue and collaboration between local communities, platform operators and the PDC community.
By drawing upon the site of Sibu’s local market, where a plethora of indigenous produce, knowledge and situated actions occur, we seek to reimagine online marketplace interfaces that not only considers the social-technical needs of local sellers, but also celebrates and reflects local understandings and practices of commerce. We aim to elicit the embodied and situated knowledge of sellers and their items, such as the durian, a controversial and multi-faceted fruit, which we offer as a provocation for the digital commerce space through participatory design practices. We invite all participants, local and international that are interested in eCommerce, platform design and community engagement, or are stakeholders of digital marketplaces to explore, collaborate and design with us in this workshop. Contact: Yang Bong (yang.bong@nottingham.ac.uk)
Title: Co-Designing Community Networks in Diverse Contexts: Bridging the Gap between Internet Infrastructures and Community-Centred Design.
Organisers: Gary Loh Chee Wyai, Rob McMahon, Sarbani Belur Banerjee, Carlos Baca Feldman, and Adrian Wan
Format: Full Day, In-Person only
Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/pdc2024
Workshop description:
We invite you to participate in a one-day workshop aimed at cultivating a global network of professionals with expertise in both the technical and social aspects of computer networks. This workshop is intended for stakeholders involved in the development, implementation, and advocacy of Community Networks, including technologists, policymakers, community organizers, financial experts and researchers. Participants will explore the intersection of technology, community empowerment, and sustainable development. We are dedicated to supporting connectivity initiatives, especially in marginalised and Global South communities.
To apply, please complete this Google Form: https://forms.gle/
Title: Design Haunted by Progress: Untying Knots.
Organisers: Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl, Maria Göransdotter, Li Jönsson, and Thomas Laurien
Format: Full Day, Hybrid
Workshop website: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVKTtplnc=/
Workshop description:
Design in general, including participatory design, has been and is still closely entangled with an idea of progress molded by modernism, technological development, rationality and economic growth. Today, when trying to shift towards other motivations and meanings in designing, we as designers find ourselves being haunted by this legacy. In this workshop we invite participants to make present and carefully untie designs’ entanglements with progress and to craft concrete imaginaries of a more socio-ecological just design after progress. Through this workshop we hope to start building a community around present-ing design histories and making a repertoire of narratives of how to be better haunted in participatory design. The workshop will take the form of a séance that is based on stories and images from the participants’ ongoing work that speaks to where they have sensed a haunting by the ghosts of progress embedded in design. This could for example be in a design method that you are using, a learning objective in your design curricula, an evaluation criterion, a design outcome that you have been involved with as a professional design practitioner, design educator or design researcher. It is imperative that the participants are in agreement with the workshop organisers that the séance is in itself an experimental attempt to explore a non-linear way of searching for the barely present or not easily discernible ideals or mechanisms of progress in participatory design. It is not to be confused with calling for supernatural spirits or deceased kins. Please register here.
Title: Embracing Ubuntu: Mapping Communal Ecologies in Participatory Design for HCI Practice.
Organisers: Jaydon Farao, Ajit G.Pillai, and Hafeni Mthoko
Format: Full Day, Hybrid
Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/ubuntupdc
Workshop description:
This one-day PDC 2024 workshop calls upon practitioners, researchers, educators, and students in Participatory Design, HCI, co-design, user experience design, design education, ethical design, and emerging technologies. Together, we’ll explore the vital role of Ubuntu values in PD and HCI, envisioning new approaches to embed these principles. Our aims are to understand how Ubuntu is currently practised within PD and HCI, identify ways to amplify its impact through interactive experiences and chart a course for future development. Outcomes will include a shared understanding of Ubuntu’s potential in our field, clear directions for further growth, and collaborative resources for teaching and applying Ubuntu principles.
Title: Envision the Transition: Nurturing our Inner Work as Changemakers
Organisers: Malé Luján Escalante, Christine Mortimer, Akino Tahir, Loretta Mao, and Marupa Hasudungan Sianturi
Format: Full-Day, In-Person Only
Workshop description:
Envision the Transition is day workshop to nurture our own roles as change-makers and agents of the transition. We understand transition as the targeted and relational actions towards systemic change in climate justice terms. The day is informed by a creative take on Ruth Levita’s Utopia as Method, in which we understand the imaginary reconstruction of society in pluriversal terms and grounded on Traditional Ecological Knowledges. The workshop is designed to move our practices from the problem-solving approach to a model of relational network of care by embracing thinking-feeling and imagination as radical emancipatory practices. Together, we will explore participation as pleasurable, embodied, playful, illogical, irreverent, vernacular, and regenerative. In short, we are re-thinking both participation and design, as practices that if aiming to achieve collective change, must integrate and rehearse spiritual and political dimensions. The session is more thought as a ritual than a workshop, come prepare to celebrate the transition with music, dance, reflection and conversations.
Accepted Half Day Workshops
Title: Comparative Insights for Community-Based Co-design: Bi-directional Inclusive Strategies Between Marginalised Communities and Researchers in Participatory Design.
Organisers: Kasper Rodil, Shorty Kandjengo, Donovan Maasz, Hasib Ahsan, and Lars Rune Christensen
Format: Half Day, In-Person Only
Workshop website: http://www.rodil.dk/PDC24workshop.html
Workshop description:
Participatory Design (PD) aims for inclusivity, but the level of inclusion varies widely. Inclusion often means integrating stakeholder perspectives into design processes, often neglecting bi-directionality, where communities also have agendas. True collaboration rests on mutual understanding, acknowledging the dynamic nature of community collaboration and the holistic impact of shaping relationships. This workshop will explore collaboration challenges and practices with marginalized communities. It will draw on the organisers’ extensive experiences with diverse groups, including nomadic and resettled indigenous communities in Namibia, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, and Syrian war refugees in Jordan. The workshop encourages sharing and reflecting on experiences with marginalized communities, welcoming contributions from participants to enrich discussions and enhance collective understanding of collaborative practices.
This workshop welcomes designers, activists, community leaders, academics, and practitioners in the field of participatory design, especially those with a focus on diversity and inclusion who have experience with or are curious about Community-Based Co-Design.
Title: Giving Voice to Nature: Participatory Design with Non-Human Stakeholders for Sustainable Development.
Organisers: Chidi Usanga, Cristiano Storni, Ann Light, Liesbeth Huybrechts, and Maurizio Teli
Format: Half Day, Hybrid
Workshop website: www.voicetonature.com
Workshop description:
In this workshop, we invite researchers and designers, practitioners and professionals from industry, environmental activists and anyone working around or interested in the environment, biodiversity or sustainability, to collaboratively explore and debate on ways we can ‘give voice’ to nature by co-designing with more-than-human natural entities. Participants at the workshop are to suggest, reflect and deliberate on possible theoretical, methodological and empirical ways in which we can involve other species in PD which has hitherto been an exclusively human activity.
This is against the backdrop of the environmental and climate crisis facing us today and the need for us as innovators to extend our efforts beyond human-centric designs to include what serves or favours other species as well. With this workshop we wish to invite not only PD researchers but also other stakeholders like industry practitioners, environmental activists, and local academics to partake and share experiences and ideas. To this purpose, all participants are invited to contribute to the workshop with a submission. These contributions are open and might range from academic position papers (e.g. on theory or methods to design with more-than-humans) to case study (e.g. from industry practitioners) or simple stories/experience of giving voice to nature and design with more-than-humans.
The workshop will hold from 13.30 to 17.00 on the 15th of August, both in person and online with both synchronous and a-synchronous activities.
Title: Infrastructuring social relations in design and social innovation
Organisers: Cyril Tjahja, Viola Petrella,Anooja J, and Violet Owen
Format: Half Day, In-Person Only
Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/workshop-infrastructuring-dsi/home
Workshop description:
Infrastructuring is commonly understood as the development of an ecosystem which consists of actors that can actively help sustain initiatives during or after a participatory design process. This is particularly relevant when working with local communities, as in this way, the ideas, solutions and ways of working with one another that have been co-created in the process can be preserved and continue in the long-term. Questioning the assumed independence, controllable, and replicable nature of infrastructuring, the workshop aims to further investigate how relational approaches influence the process. Participants are invited to bring stories, images or artefacts that can help to illustrate how various dimensions of social relations influence their work with communities, and in which way design and/or designers play a role in supporting this. By sharing and reflecting on these experiences, participants collectively broaden their understanding of how designer practitioners and researchers can help sustain local initiatives as well as how position themselves accordingly.
Title: Surfacing Conflicts in Participatory Design: Methodological Considerations.
Organisers: Aakash Gautam, Deborah Tatar, Christian Matheis, and Gopinaath Kannabiran
Format: Half Day, Hybrid
Workshop website: https://surfacingconflictsinpd.wordpress.com/
Workshop description:
As participatory design (PD) practitioners, we know that building relationships with community partners inevitably involves attending to conflicts in values, assumptions, and priorities. However, fewer PD methods productively engage with conflicts as vital elements of the co-engagement process. In this half-day hybrid workshop, PD scholars and practitioners will come together to reflect on their practices and chart methodological considerations for consciously revealing and holding onto conflicts. We will explore the concept of “conscientious discourse” as one potential approach that encourages understanding multiple perspectives while maintaining awareness of one’s own position. Through interactive sessions, we will collectively identify common themes around conflicts that arise in PD engagements and envision methods to constructively surface those tensions. We will then try to synthesize the discussions into pragmatic guidelines for the broader PD community on embracing contestation in future projects. We will also draw out open questions to further the conversation. PD researchers and practitioners from all experience levels are welcome. Join us to share stories, develop new approaches, and build connections with others interested in the generative potential of conflict! Express your interest by submitting a position paper, reflection, or video. Please see https://surfacingconflictsinpd.wordpress.com for details.
