This IFIP WG 13.8 workshop on HCI for Digital Democracy and Citizen Participation will take place preceding INTERACT2023, in York, UK, on 29 August 2023. Online attendance will also be allowed.
Motivation
This workshop will explore and discuss how Human Computer Interaction (HCI) as a field of knowledge and practice can contribute to develop plat-forms for digital democracy and participation. These issues are mainly seen at two levels: (1) the optimal design of the digital environment of citizen participation platforms, and (2) explore how HCI can contribute to the de-velopment of new trends in Political Science, such as e-democracy. The practice of designing digital platforms for citizen participation and democ-racy could benefit greatly from a multidisciplinary sociotechnical approach that incorporates into design reflection on issues of democratic theory and practice, legal and political science. Researchers have sought to articulate design patterns and evaluation tools for these platforms with general per-spectives on the democraticity of the processes they sustain. But citizen participation systems give rise to specific problems related to usability and user experience. The user is both the institution, company, formal, and in-formal collective, as well as the subjects that interact with these platforms. This workshop proposes a multidisciplinary exploration and discussion about design of digital platforms for citizen participation and democracy, including issues such as the necessary digital and technological resources, typology of tools that allow communication (to share knowledge), create community (to find and integrate individuals into a collective) and cooperation between individuals (to achieve common community goals), legality of the decisions taken in these platforms or subjective trust in their general function.
The target audience for this workshop includes researchers and practitioners from different disciplines working on topics related to Digital Democracy and Citizen Participation in HCI. Early-stage researchers and PhD students are also encouraged to submit work-in-progress papers.
Topics of Interest
We look for position papers trying to answer one or more of the following questions:
- How can different approaches towards sociotechnical and interaction design pro-mote or undermine democratic participation?
- What are the best design patterns and requirements that lead to effective platforms for Digital Democracy and Participation?
- How can digital democracy platforms be evaluated?
- What are the best tools and methods to support communication, community formation and deliberation in democratic processes?
- Design thinking and innovation: how the design process should be led by democratic requirements and not by technology affordances?
- How to identify forms of democracy and associated practices through the presenta-tion of relevant case studies.
- How to identify and assess the nature and type of citizen participation in the pro-cess of design of these platforms.
Workshop Objectives
In this workshop, we understand the above issues as sociotechnical in nature and aim to trace the cultural and political dynamics that drive the design of this type of platforms. More concretely, we solicit position papers that help us fulfil the following objectives:
- To help develop a framework of HCI to be applied in e-democracy and participatory processes.
- Collect examples and experiences of digital democracy platforms.
- Collecting examples and experiences that show that the field of HCI can be beneficial in the design and development of digital platforms for citizen decision processes
- Formulate a research agenda for future work on digital democracy research on HCI.
Expected Outcomes
The workshop will produce a research agenda for studying the optimum development of digital platforms for e-democracy processes through a HCI lens, and how best to understand and analyze them. The aim with this research agenda is to stimulate further research interest and provide direction for critical research on HCI apply to design digital participatory platforms. In addition, extended versions of the workshop papers will be published by Springer in the LNCS series as a volume collecting papers from the INTERACT 2023 workshops and in a special issue in the Interacting with Computers journal.
Submission Procedure
Please submit your position paper of four pages in the INTERACT 2021 proceedings format to Jose Abdelnour-Nocera at abdejos[at]uwl.ac.uk
Deadline: 31st of May 2023
Notification of Acceptance: 8th of June 2023
Each submission will be reviewed by two reviewers from the larger IFIP TC13.8 community. Participation in the workshop requires an accepted position paper.
Organizing Committee
The workshop is organized by IFIP TC13 WG13.8 – Interaction Design for International Development. The organizers are:
José Abdelnour Nocera is professor in Sociotechnical Design and Head of the Sociotechnical Group for Innovation and User Experience at the University of West London. He is the current Chair for IFIP TC13 WG13.8 and the British Computer Society Sociotechnical Specialist Group. His interests lie in the sociotechnical and cultural aspects of stakeholder diversity in systems design.
Estela Peralta is Senior Lecture in Design Engineering at the University of Sevilla (Spain). Her research focuses on development smart environment and products adapted to the human factor, considering biomechanical, cognitive, and environmental aspects, for any type of population, including people with special needs
Lene Nielsen is associate professor at IT university Copenhagen (Denmark). She current research democratically owned enterprises, their use of technology, and the way they govern the business. As member of Forum on IT and Cooperative Governance (FITCG) she researched democratic entrepreneurship for the Danish Parliament that resulted in suggestions for new legislation to further cooperatives in Denmark.
Juan José Gómez Gutiérrez is Lecturer in Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of Sevilla (Spain). His research focuses on art and politics, including critical urban theory, cultural policies, the high and the low in art and hegemony.
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