Public design of digital commons in urban places: A case study

Highlights

• Digital commons are digital resources self-governed by concerned people.

• Public design is designing for publics and in the public dimension.

• Recursive publics are the publics recursively concerned with digital commons.

• Designers position themselves in relation to public issues.

• Urban places are an arena for the public design of digital commons.

Abstract

This paper can be framed within the growing interest in the public dimension of technology design: it proposes a framework for the public design of urban technologies by elaborating on the concepts of digital commons, matters of concerns and engagement. The framework is discussed through the case study of a mobility application developed within a wider project of digital commons design. We contrast a Smart City approach and a urban computing one, and we argue that the latter is more fruitful in the long run, since it entails elements for the establishment of forms of recursive engagement of users, who co-produce digital commons together with technology designers as a response to their matters of concern. Applying our framework to the design of urban technologies, we conclude that design should support collaborative practices starting from the articulation of matters of concern to designing in a participatory way.

Introduction

There is a growing attention to the public dimension of design, that is the capability of designers to engage with issues that are relevant for the society they live in (Bødker et al., 2006, DiSalvo et al., 2014). This aspect is particularly relevant to the field of urban computing (Forlano, 2013), where many research projects are tightly connected to the specific environment in which they will be deployed. In this paper, we frame the relation between public design and urban computing by mediating it through the concept of digital commons: after articulating our theoretical tenets in detail, we discuss our point of view in the light of a case study dealing with the design of a mobility application. Our argument is located in the problem space of current changes in the design of digital technologies, which has shifted from focusing on individual experiences to problematizing the social and public dimensions of technology production and use. We focus on the city, starting with an understanding of urban places as characterized by social relations and by the emergence of practices and subjectivities. The complexity of such scenario is in our opinion incompletely represented within the concept of “Smart City”, one of the dominant narratives in the industry and governments’ perspective on the relation between digital technologies and urban places; we believe instead that the academic discourse on urban computing is better suited to analyse the relationship between the city and the practices occurring in it since it promotes a focus on people, technology and spaces (Foth et al., 2011b).

On top of this grounding, we articulate a perspective on digital commons: shared artefacts which can be taken over and self-governed by concerned people. We suggest that the design of digital commons can be grounded in the concepts of “matters of concern” and “recursive engagement”, both of which emphasize the articulation of people concerns as part of the designers׳ role, thus highlighting a fertile ground for public design. In particular, we will discuss how publicly designed digital commons should be able to stimulate the formation of recursive publics, which engage with the technological and institutional elements that allow their existence as a public, deepening their knowledge and domains of action.

We support our line of thought by discussing the case of a mobility application that has been intended as a digital commons and which followed a process of public design moving from the identification of concerns to the stimulation of engagement and the preliminary constitution of a recursive public. More specifically, we discuss two instantiations of the same technological artefact: one in which the approach to engagement has been driven by a situated and participatory perspective, in line with the urban computing approach, and one characterized by a top-down engagement strategy, more in line with the concept of the Smart City. In conclusion, we show how a urban computing approach has stimulated a more sustained engagement, and we reflect on some lessons learned during the project.