Part 3: Services, Processes and InfrastructureInternational audienceThe idea that public e-services are better off being designed with the potential users’ needs in focus is today an almost unquestioned truth (user centered design maybe being the most frequent methodological toolbox). The idea that they are even better off being designed with the potential users is an almost equally established understanding (where participatory design could be claimed to be the most prominent methodology). However, in this paper the overall claim is that by a combination of updated design thinking, and development and participatory studies from outside the digital design discipline, a deepened and more nuanced understanding of participatory practices is presented. This is shown by an exploratory study on the design process of a public e-service to make the city accessible for its citizens and visiting tourists

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Though ‘digitalization’ has become a buzzword and policy objective in public-sector development, the struggle to grasp and define it as a modern phenomenon continues. Furthermore, research has long shown that it is difficult to extract the value with which digitalization is associated. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to uncover the enactment by a specific set of actors of digitalization as production and reproduction practices. We interviewed a group of governmentally sanctioned regional digitalization coordinators to identify how digitalization was translated and implemented by the appointed professionals. We applied Orlikowski and Gash’s three levels of technology (nature, strategy, and use) and combined these with Feenberg’s matrix of four views on technology to produce an analytical framework. Our findings show that the making of digitalization can be described as like ‘nailing jelly to a wall’, owing to the lack description of its capabilities and functionalities, coupled with a raison d’etre that is highly elusive beyond ‘change’, in very general terms.

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