Viewpoint

Abstract

Viewpoint is a public voting device developed to allow residents in a disadvantaged community to make their voices heard through a simple, lightweight interaction. This was intended to open a new channel of communication within the community and increase community members' perception of their own efficacy. Local elected officials and community groups were able to post questions on devices located in public spaces, where residents could vote for one of two responses. Question authors were subsequently required to post a response indicating any actions to be taken. Following a two-month trial, we present our experiences and contribute guidelines for the design of public democracy tools and dimensions impacting their effectiveness, including credibility, efficacy and format.

Social Printers

“…In the same way that physical devices have been used to engage people in political issues in public spaces [38,42], we saw how the object was able to engage the entire household rather than just a single viewer using a personal device. Although one participant in each household took ownership of the device, the other household members were often involved in discussions around the printer and debate.…”

Strategies for Engaging Communities in Creating Physical Civic Technologies

“…Like other neighbourhood-scale technologies, many of these applications have been deployed in public spaces and taken advantage of their physical location, for example by capturing lightweight data from passers-by [e.g. 14,15,29,34]. Other examples of civic technologies in neighbourhoods and communities have included locative apps [13] and citizen sensing [8] and have often been grounded in DIY activities, such as fruit foraging [9], which show citizens taking an active role in shaping their environment.…”

Experiences of Delivering a Public Health Data Service

“…More recently, research on in-the-wild deployments has seen a shift in discourse around understanding technologies in situ -not only for the short trajectory of a research project but for the extended engagement over the long term. This shift in discourse has presented new ways of thinking and reporting on designing for prolonged use and larger scale deployments [39,[50][51][52], where typically, this information would be absent from publications [51]. The notion of prolonged use, and large (even global deployments) is increasingly important within HCI, particular when prototypes or tools have been developed to support political activism, community engagement, or health-related behaviours.…”