GVU Brown Bag - Carl DiSalvo

The Robot Canary in The Urban Coal Mine: Enabling Communities with Emerging Technologies

Carl DiSalvo, Assistant Professor, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture

Abstract:
Participation is a strong theme in contemporary technology design, usually centered on the subjects of user-generated content and user specification of form and function. But how do we design for participation in the civic arena? Specifically, how do we design technology that motivates and enables people to be engaged social actors in their local environment? What processes and products would we need to develop, how might we assess this endeavor, what theoretical constructs would we call upon and what might be the theoretical and practical implications of such a practice?

These questions motivate my current research and in this talk I will explore them through a discussion of the Neighborhood Networks project. Neighborhood Networks is an ongoing project that combines community arts, participatory design, ethnography and informal learning research to investigate how communities make use of emerging technologies to discover and creatively communicate issues that are important to them. Central to the project are a series of workshops in which city residents use a custom sensing and actuation platform (The Canary) to explore and visualize local environmental conditions. For example, in the Summer 2007 workshops, participants in a Pittsburgh neighborhood designed a series of robotic devices that surfaced and addressed issues of noise pollution and traffic calming. In this talk I'll describe the design of The Canary, the workshop activities and their outcomes. In addition to presenting the project, I'll use it to reflect on the practice of designing for participation, specifically calling attention to how designing for participation prompts new ways of thinking about and doing design, producing challenges and opportunities for contemporary design research and discourse.