In this paper we present some reflections stemming from a case study aimed at building a socio-technical infrastructure for supporting participatory design and development. We summarize and abstract our experience into an hourglass approach defined by the intersection of two co-evolving dimensions of infrastructuring: the social and the technical ones. Different subsets of the community, characterized by the increasing involvement of volunteers, position themselves along the two axes and have different roles in the design and use of the generated artefact.
The hourglass approach we propose integrates and expands existing proposals related
to social innovation such as crowdsourcing [
structuring: we refer to technical infrastructuring as the ensemble of computing
technologies which support the use and production of IT services and to social
infrastructuring as the set of human actors who influence, shape and represent the community.
Together, these two axes define an hourglass structure (Figure 1) [
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
In the field-work phase, we focused on building the foundations for our
infrastructuring endeavour: to this end, we applied traditional User Centered Design (UCD)
techniques with the goal of understanding the general domain, clarifying who the users
were, and setting up the adequate conditions for applying PD. This implied the
involvement of a large user base among the students of a local Italian university and the
development of a service platform; the members of the lab created a first set of Smart Campus
mobile apps on top of it. In order to seed the community, HCI and PD practices were
incorporated into the academic career of computer science students to whom the Smart
Campus apps were released for testing. At the same time, several channels were set up
to facilitate the communication between the students-users and the Smart Campus lab:
a forum, diaries, surveys. From this stage on, we moved from UCD to PD: a group of
students in fact started developing the conceptual design of iFame as part of an
academic assignment. These students then took a paid internship at the Smart Campus lab,
thus actively contributing to the design and development of the app and allowing to
further move to the participatory development phase. It is important to note that each
subset of users spontaneously emerged from the social infrastructure, rather than being
selected based on some unique characteristics as it usually happens for example with
lead users [
Similar to a grain of sand, iFame fell through the lower part of the hourglass to be received by the user community seeded in the design phase. Most members of the community just profited from the information provided by the app; some of them, however, also contributed content to the app by commenting and rating the food. A smaller part of users chose to contribute at a higher level, reflecting on the app and sharing their opinions with the staff and the rest of the community through the forum, diaries and surveys. Finally, as the community expanded also to students of other departments, we have some evidence of the willingness of some members of the community to engage even more actively by contributing to the further development of the technical and social infrastructuring, in different ways corresponding to their different skills. 3
The hourglass approach integrates and expands previous proposals to social innovation.
First of all, the initial steps of the design phase resemble a crowdsourcing approach in
the emphasis put on the wisdom of a large number of people [
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
The hourglass is a temporal process: by the time we reached the stage of participatory development, we had also created a receptive environment through the incubation in the lab (which provided technological, political, organizational and logistic support), the establishment of the platform as a technological infrastructure, and an acceptance of participation also at an institutional level. Moreover, an instrumental knowledge base was built, for instance by incorporating PD practices into the academic career of students; this knowledge increased as they went through the hourglass. The social and technical streams evolved in parallel to create the conditions for the actual pursuit of social innovation: however, neither of them alone was sufficient to achieve this goal, and thus they needed to intersect at some point (in our case study, generating iFame).
The co-evolution of the social and technical infrastructures contributes to coping
with scaling issues [
The innovation milieu where the project originated is a mid-size University campus
in Italy characterized by limited possibilities for direct participation. Since the
beginning of the design, the milieu has been changing and the selection of roles the students
could play evolved from mere testers and informants to active designers and
developers. This suggests that we succeeded in creating a space for collaborative development,
and at the same time in creating a receptive environment for participation. Finally, the
staged process proposed by the hourglass approach facilitates the definition of
responsibilities in a dynamic environment. Designers fine-tuned their intervention preparing
a socio-technical ground to maximise participants’ gains and minimise failures [
We believe that the hourglass approach can show some potential when dealing with a context that is not historically and culturally oriented to public participation. For instance, the university feared that the canteen community would use the communications channels in an inappropriate way: our social and technological intervention has allowed them to overcome these worries. On the other hand, user participation also raised some difficulties; bringing user representatives through the hourglass approach is especially hard when unpopular decisions have to be taken. The hourglass structure also represents a dynamic system that in some cases can be turned upside down, starting a new cycle of innovation.
In conclusion, nurturing and maintaining “infrastructures” are among the main challenges that bottom-up approaches to innovation are currently facing. These challenges are intensified if innovation is the hub where research, education and business converge. Involving and accommodating different stakeholders and activities to unfolding situations requires a shift from current approaches adopted in these areas: this shift entails constant dialog among stakeholders, modification of current processes, and the capability to adjust to changing circumstances. We believe that the hourglass approach can facilitate these processes. Proc. of Second International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age - CoPDA 2014 Como (Italy), May 27th, 2014 (published at http://ceur-ws.org).
Copyright © 2014 for the individual papers by the papers' authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.