Nassim JafariNaimi co-organized a panel and presentation at Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Conference in Copenhagen (with Ingrid Erickson, Rutgers University). Her paper, "Beyond Access and Expression: A New Mandate for Design" explores design issues in digital media.
A key element of the discourse surrounding digital media today is the ability for social and mobile media to enable new modes of distributed collective action. Looking closely at a few recent exemplars such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, it is clear that shared concern (as opposed to any one key technology) is the locus that brings people together across varied socio-economic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. The move toward social movements such as these that spill beyond the traditional bounds of time and space demand a new mandate for design--one that leverages a more nuanced understanding of  the origins of grassroots collective action and the constituents of democratic forms of relationship. This presentation will problematize the oft cherished foci of access (i.e., digital divide, citizen journalism, crowdsourced reportage) and identity & expression (i.e., enabling stories to be told and heard) to identify the assumptions regarding what it means to be civically engaged in the context of this discourse. We conclude with speculations on how designers might orient their future work in ways that support new forms of mediated collective action and civic participation.