Recent HCI research has addressed emerging approaches for public engagement. One such public-facing method which has gained popularity over the previous decade has been open design events, or hackathons. In this article, we report on DemVR, a hackathon event that invited designers, technologists, and students of these disciplines to design Virtual Reality (VR) environments for people with dementia and their care partners. While our event gained reasonable attraction from designers and developers, this article unpacks the challenges in representing and involving people with dementia in these events, which had multiple knock-on effects on participant's outputs. Our analysis presents insights into participants’ motivations, challenges participants faced when constructing their “absent user”, and the design features teams developed to address the social context of the user. We conclude the article by proposing a set of commitments for collaborative design events, community building through design, and reification in design.

Peer support through social media has been shown to have significant potential to improve health care outcomes. Despite this, very little is understood about how to design a social media-based peer support system. We use the model of unplatformed design to structure a multi-phase design process of a WhatsApp-based peer support system, with and for participants undergoing extreme weight loss as part of a health care intervention into diabetes management. From a mixed-methods evaluation of a three-month deployment of the system and reflections upon the design process we explore the value of the model in facilitating the expression of authentic peer support, and identify how the unique characteristics of unplatformed design allowed for the creation of a peer support system that was responsive to participants’ existing everyday use of social media technologies.

Social media is seen as a powerful driver of change for language teaching and learning. Many studies have looked at the use and adoption rates of social media in language education, but studies that take a more fine-grained understanding of the differences between individual features of social media and how they are perceived by learners and teachers are rare. We present an analysis of the results of two workshops in a UK university that illustrate disparities between how individual features of social media are used generally, and how they are used for educational purposes between learners and teachers of languages. To understand the underlying perceptions of and attitudes towards features of social media we performed an inductive thematic analysis of discussion data generated at the workshops. From this we surface three themes: social media as distinct language type; navigating appropriateness; and prioritizing authentic communication flow. From these themes, we offer four design recommendations for practitioners and researchers who wish to incorporate social media in language teaching. These recommendations are: pay attention to specific features of social media and model authentic use; create learner-led and learner-owned spaces; create structured pathways to authentic social media use; and incorporate social media in assessment.

Community engagements are qualitative processes that make use of participants local knowledge for democratic decision-making, but often exclude participants from data analysis and dissemination. This can mean that they are left feeling that their voice is not properly represented in the final output. This paper presents a digital community engagement process, TalkFutures, that actively involves participants in the production, distributed analysis and summarization of qualitative data. The design of TalkFutures was explored through a five-week deployment with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) as part of a consultation designed to inform future strategy. Our analysis of deployment metrics and post-deployment interviews outline how TalkFutures: (i) increased modes of participation across the qualitative workflow; (ii) reduced barriers to participation; and (iii) improved representation in the engagement processes.

Using existing social media technologies as a resource for design offers significant potential for sustainable and scalable ways of coordinating participation. We look at three exemplar projects in three distinct domains that have successfully coordinated participation through the configuration and augmentation of existing social media technologies: participatory future forecasting, participatory health research, and connectivist learning. In this paper we conceptualise social media technologies as material for design, that is, as the raw material with which coordinated participation is realized. From this we develop a model that proposes four material qualities of social media technologies, morphology, role, representation of activity and permeability, and point to how they can be productively employed in the design of coordination of participation.

WhatsApp, as the world's most popular messaging application, offers significant opportunities for improving the reach and effectiveness of engagement projects. In collaboration with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) we designed WhatFutures, a collaborative future forecasting engagement for global youth using WhatsApp. WhatFutures was successfully deployed with 487 players across 5 countries (Kenya, Bulgaria, Finland, Australia and Hong Kong) to inform strategic change within the IFRC. Based on our analysis of the activity - including 16,100 messages, 95 multimedia artifacts, and a post-engagement survey - we present a reflection upon the design decisions underpinning WhatFutures and identify how decisions made around group structures, processes and externalization of outputs influenced engagement and data quality. We conclude with the wider implications of our findings for the design of engagements that best utilize the affordances of existing messaging applications.

HCI has a tradition of engaging in democratic practices and contributing to public service innovation. Working with complex socio-political realities presents significant challenges for HCI researchers, which are amplified by the current democratic and economic crisis. In this article, we present insights from a longitudinal study where we worked with multiple stakeholders in the context of an austerity-driven transformation of public parks service in a city in the North East of England. Over the course of 20 months, we developed a participatory socio-technical process designed to create collaborative spaces between communities and institutions to re-envision and re-shape the city's public parks service. The study contributes to HCI research concerned with developing tools and processes that aim at connecting across the boundaries between communities and institutions. Our process and the resulting analysis expose the practical complexities of transformation and co-creation processes and the troubles that come with opening spaces for wider participation within highly contested and political settings. We provide an orientation for HCI design research aspiring to contribute to social innovation and democratic practices in troubled times.