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Creating a Sociotechnical API: Designing City-Scale Community Engagement

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Community engagement is to cities what user experience is to computing: it signifies a large category that simultaneously speaks to general qualities of interaction and to specific ways of doing that interaction. Recently, digital civics has emerged as a research area with a comprehensive approach to designing for civic encounters where community engagement is a primary concern for designing systems and processes that support broad civic interaction. In short, over the past year, we worked with municipal officials, service providers, and city residents to design a community engagement playbook detailing best practices for city-scale engagement. The playbook, as well as the collaborative process that produced it, provides a roadmap for thinking through the kinds of systems that might populate the design space of city-scale digital civics. This paper details our design-led research process and builds on emerging literature on designing for digital civic interaction.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
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    Published: 02 May 2017

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    1. community engagement
    2. digital civics
    3. participatory design
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