Large scale urban planning consultations can elicit public contributions with limited reflectivity and scope in comparison with participatory projects in HCI. We therefore investigated how digital technology can be configured to enable participation at greater depth and at scale in Metro Futures 2020 – an online public consultation on light rail trains. Drawing on participatory methods used in HCI, we devised experience-centered and creative activities at different depths and scales – from “shallow and wide” social media polls to “deep and narrow” online workshops – and a website with three ways of exploring a digital train mock-up. Participation on the website was both at scale and to notable depth according to our analyses of data entry behavior and website comments. Our findings show that the value of online public consultations can be increased through providing experiential context for design proposals, supporting exploration of design details via immersion, and providing interconnected activities of varying depths and scales.

The rise of big data and smart sensing, with the promise of more educated and informed decisions, has fuelled a shift towards more data-driven decision-making in local and national government. However, we are observing a disconnect between the people who are affected by these decisions and their access to tools and resources to collect data in order to provide the needed evidence for change. To truly democratise this process and for citizens to become active prosumers of data, new mechanisms of citizen data production are needed. In this paper we report on a two-year ethnographic and iterative co-design process with the local community. This work encompassed the design, development and deployment of SenseMyStreet (SeMS), a bespoke sensor commissioning toolkit that enables citizens and community groups to use and commission a city's scientific-grade environmental monitors, determining where they will be located on their streets and collecting data to evidence hyper-local issues. Unlike prior research, which creates alternative data sources to contest city data, our toolkit helps integrate citizen commissioned data into the city datasets used by citizens and decision-makers. Reflecting on the design process and evaluating the ways people engaged with the digital tools of the toolkit, we highlight how commissioning can be configured to promote equity in the smart city, empower citizens to take ownership of issues and facilitate the creation of community networks that utilise the data for local benefit.

Whereas there have been significant improvements in the quality of care provided for people with dementia, limited attention to the importance for people with dementia being enabled to make positive social contributions within care home contexts can restrict their sense of agency. In this paper we describe the design and deployment of 'Printer Pals' a receipt-based print media device, which encourages social contribution and agency within a care home environment. The design followed a two-year ethnography, from which the need for highlighting participation and supporting agency for residents within the care home became clear. The residents use of Printer Pals mediated participation in a number of different ways, such as engaging with the technology itself, offering shared experiences and participating in co-constructive and meaningful ways, each of which is discussed. We conclude with a series of design consideration to support agentic and caring interactions through inclusive design practices.

We describe the iterative design, development and learning process we undertook to produce Gabber, a digital platform that aims to support distributed capture of spoken interviews and discussions, and their qualitative analysis. Our aim is to reduce both expertise and cost barriers associated with existing technologies, making the process more inclusive. Gabber structures distributed audio data capture, facilitates participatory sensemaking, and supports collaborative reuse of audio. We describe our design and development journey across three distinct field trials over a two-year period. Reflecting on the iterative design process, we offer insights into the challenges faced by non-experts throughout their qualitative practices, and provide guidance for researchers designing systems to support engagement in these practices.

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.

This paper presents insights from a collaboration with cycling advocates and local authorities to consider how HCI can open productive spaces for citizens to contribute to the realization of social goals. We worked with members of a walking and cycling advocacy organization to explore the potential for technology-mediated data collection to support advocacy and action taking. Based on our initial findings, we developed and deployed Spokespeople-a system to enable people who cycle to collect, curate and make visible their everyday journeys and experiences. We then worked with participants, cycling advocates and local authority transport planners to explore how citizens can contribute beyond data collection, by curating and prioritizing their experiences and exploring possible routes to action. We identify future directions for technology design to support citizens to make meaningful contributions to changes in the city through annotated routes, prioritization and community commissioning processes.

Rich metadata is becoming a key part of the broadcast production pipeline. This information can be used to deliver compelling new consumption experiences which are personalized, location-aware, interactive and multi-screen. However, media producers are struggling to generate the metadata required for such experiences, using inefficient post-production solutions which are limited in how much of the original context they can capture. In response, we present Media of Things (MoT), a tool for on-location media productions. MoT enables practical and flexible generation of sensor based point-of-capture metadata. We demonstrate how embedded ubiquitous sensing technologies such as the Internet of Things can be leveraged to produce context rich, time sequenced metadata in a production studio. We reflect on how this workflow can be integrated within the constraints of broadcast production and the possibilities that emerge from access to rich data at the beginning of the production lifecycle to produce well described media for reconfigurable consumption.

Recent HCI research has highlighted the potential afforded by maker technologies for supporting new forms of DIY Assistive Technology (DIY-AT) for people with disabilities. Furthermore, the popular discourse surrounding both the maker movement and disability is one of democratisation and empowerment. Despite this, critics argue that maker movement membership lacks diversity and that within DIY-AT, it is seldom the people with disabilities who are creating such designs. We conducted a qualitative study that explored how people with disabilities experience the empowering potential of making. We analysed online videos by makers with disabilities and conducted fieldwork at two makerspaces. These informed the design of DIY-Abilities, a series of workshops for people with disabilities in which participants could learn different maker technologies and complete their own maker project. Through analysis of participants' narratives we contribute a new perspective on the specific social and material capacities of accessible maker initiatives.

This paper describes the challenges and lessons learned in the experience-centered design (ECD) of the Spheres of Wellbeing, a technology to promote the mental health and wellbeing of a group of women, suffering from significant mental health problems and living in a medium secure hospital unit. First, we describe how our relationship with mental health professionals at the hospital and the aspirations for person-centric care that we shared with them enabled us, in the design of the Spheres, to innovate outside traditional healthcare procedures. We then provide insights into the challenges presented by the particular care culture and existing services and practices in the secure hospital unit that were revealed through our technology deployment. In discussing these challenges, our design enquiry opens up a space to make sense of experience living with complex mental health conditions in highly constrained contexts within which the deployment of the Spheres becomes an opportunity to think about wellbeing in similar contexts.