Call for Participation

In this workshop, we explore the opportunities of conducting multi-site participatory design (PD) and research through hybrid present–telepresent participatory methods, and share issues, challenges, methods and empirical examples pertaining to this as a goal.  

PD must increasingly be able to address and serve various global contexts. Overall, then, there is a fundamental need to raise previously unheard global voices in technology design and development, and to bring various stakeholders together. The bread and butter of participatory methodology has been physically co-located creative work with participants, with the aim to immerse the practitioners in the use context, and to learn about the practices, needs and values relevant for the stakeholders in this context. This embedded, hands-on work is crucial and arguably forms the basis of PD practice. Often, this has also meant that PD research teams have been mostly physically co-located, at least for the duration of the PD process. This approach has fundamental validity, as PD requires an in-depth understanding of the cultural context in which it is performed. 

Nevertheless, this approach also has its drawbacks, as collocated work means both geographical and financial limitations to the type of work that can be accomplished. Conducting multi-site co-located work may be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive, and may also require extensive physical capabilities from both practitioners and participants, leaving many voices unheard. Furthermore, the rapid adoption of various synchronous and asynchronous communication methods through online collaborative tools offer opportunities for more continuous, more dispersed, and more diverse PD research settings and processes. 

During the world-wide social distancing efforts of 2020–2022, an enormous leap forward was made seemingly overnight in adopting novel modalities of participation and collaboration. As we have since moved into a post social distancing world, it is important and timely to both seize the lessons learned from the pandemic-induced forced hybridization of PD, and to keep developing the potentialities that emerged from the experience. However, this opportunity also raises several questions, including:  How can we enable various global stakeholders to take part in global hybrid PD? How can PD practitioners work across cultural spheres in distant settings, and how can we perform culturally aware and sensitive work withot ‘being there’? What can a partly technology-mediated PD process consist of, what knowledge can it produce, and what limitations does it have? What novel challenges and opportunities pertaining to accessibility emerge in a technology-mediated PD process? What values, competences and awareness do PD practitioners need when conducting PD work in culturally diverse hybrid settings? What PD processes or methods are not suited to hybrid work and best left for the “nonline” world? What theories, methods and lessons from other fields of research, e,g, from remote ethnography or Computer-Supported Collaborative Work, could be applied?

We invite those interested to submit a position paper (3–4 pages) in the SIGCHI Single column paper format. These contributions may address, for example.

• Theoretical considerations: e.g., utilising key theoretical concepts from various fields to build understanding of how to conduct hybrid participatory design and research in various global contexts

• Case studies: empirical works that analyze experiences of hybrid participatory design and research in various global contexts

• Design-based explorations in real-world settings: e.g. implementation of participatory design and research approaches in different global contexts in hybrid environments

• Methods: Methodologies that can contribute towards better implementation of participation in various global contexts and in hybrid environments

• Thematic issues; e.g. ethical issues; various user or stakeholder groups, various areas of design, global perspectives, etc. pertaining to conducting hybrid PD in multi-side, multicultural contexts

Papers may be submitted to: aale.luusua (at) oulu.fi and johanna.ylipulli (at) aalto.fi

Deadline: EXTENDED until Feb 19, 2023 (23:59 AoE); Previously Feb 8, 2023 (23:59 AoE) 

Notifications: Mar 1, 2023 (23:59 AoE)

Workshop Duration: one day

Date & place: Sunday April 23, Hybrid workshop

This workshop is a part of the ACM CHI conference. Full conference program at: https://chi2023.acm.org/

Preliminary schedule

This is a one-day workshop, with the following preliminary schedule. All times in Central European Time (CET).

Session 1:

10:00am Welcome and hosts’ introductions

10:15am  Mini-Lecture on Experiences, Opportunities and Challenges of Hybrid Multi-site Participatory Design and Research: Case India–Finland

10: 30am Mini-Lecture on Developing Digital Tools for Participatory Work in Urban Planning

10:45am Participants’ presentations: Recounting experiences, reflecting on methods and building theory

12:30am Lunch break

Session 2:

01:30pm Identifying opportunities and challenges of Multi-site, Multi-cultural Participatory Design in Hybrid Environments (groups)

02:15pm Identifying tools, methods and theories of Multi-site, Multi-cultural Participatory Design in Hybrid Environments (groups)

03:00pm Coffee break

Session 3:

03:15pm Session 3: Group presentations, Combining the results

04:00pm Session 4: Roundtable discussion; Next steps for the workshop group

05:00pm Closing the workshop

06:00pm Dinner reservation for in-person participants

Light refreshments during breaks are included for in-person participants; however, lunch and dinner are not provided.

Organizers

Aale Luusua, D.Sc. (Tech), is an architect, researcher and University Lecturer positioned at the Oulu School of Architecture and INTERACT Research Unit at the University of Oulu, Finland. With a general research focus on urban environments, citizen participation, digitalization, design theory and interdisciplinary research, Dr. Luusua led the Academy of Finland postdoctoral project Experiencing Artificial Intelligence in the Smart City (AICity). Dr. Luusua’s works have been published in leading international scientific books and journals published by SAGE, Routledge and Springer, and in leading scientific conference proceedings, such as the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and the ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. Dr. Luusua has also co-led international workshops e.g. in the Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference, Critical Alternatives 2015, at Designing Interactive Systems 2020, and at IndiaHCI2020.

Johanna Ylipulli, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist and adjunct professor (docent) in digital culture. She currently works at Aalto University’s Department of Computer Science, where she is the PI of the Academy of Finland Research Fellow project Digital Inequality in Smart Cities (DISC) and subproject PI in the project Designing Inclusive & Trustworthy Digital Public Services for Migrants in Finland. Her research has focused on cultural and social implications of new digital technologies in urban contexts. Dr. Ylipulli has worked in exceptionally interdisciplinary research environments in leading Finnish Universities, and published broadly, in fora spanning from prominent social scientific journals to flagship conferences of human-computer interaction. These include International Communication Gazette, Technological Forecasting and Social Change and Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and publishers such as Routledge and SAGE.  Dr. Ylipulli has co-led international workshops e.g. in the Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference, Critical Alternatives 2015, at Designing Interactive Systems 2020, and at CHI 2021.

Dani Kalarikalayil Raju is co-founder of Studio Hasi, a startup with a mission to diversify future making. He is an alumnus of IDC School of Design, IIT Bombay and has been working with resource constrained user groups (Emergent Users) in India for the past 7 years in collaboration with Computational Foundry at Swansea University. The consistent theme in his work is that of exploring futures with users having constraints such as low literacy, lack of technology experience and low self-efficacy, by engaging them in workshops and deployment studies to re-imagine forward looking technologies for the world. Working with emergent users in two of Mumbai’s slums, his recent work explored the value and uses of photovoltaic (PV) self-powered deformable digital materials for interhome connections. He was awarded Gary Marsden Travel Awards for presenting this work at CHI 2021.

Docent, Dr. Emilia Rönkkö, D.Sc. (Tech), is an adjunct professor, architect and docent of urban planning at the Oulu School of Architecture, University of Oulu, Finland. Her expertise covers a wide range of interdisciplinary research topics related to urban health, resiliency strategies and technological innovations supporting smart urban governance. Her primary branch of research work is focusing on evidence-informed urban planning approaches and data-driven tools supporting anticipatory and participatory practices. She currently works as a subproject PI in the Academy of Finland`s Strategic Research project RECIPE (Resistant Cities: Urban Planning as Means for Pandemic Prevention). Amongst its objectives, the project studies virtual collaboration platforms and their role in knowledge co-creation, knowledge transfer across different boundaries, and overcoming silos in urban planning. In the private sector, Dr. Rönkkö has been involved in the design and development of digital tools for the use of urban planning.