M. Asad, C. A. Le Dantec, B. Nielsen, and K. Diedrick. Creating a Sociotechnical API: Designing City-Scale Community Engagement. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM (2017), 2295–2306.
(Best Paper Honorable Mention)

Abstract

Community engagement is to cities what user experience is to computing: it signifies a large category that simultaneously speaks to general qualities of interaction and to specific ways of doing that interaction. Recently, digital civics has emerged as a research area with a comprehensive approach to designing for civic encounters where community engagement is a primary concern for designing systems and processes that support broad civic interaction. In short, over the past year, we worked with municipal officials, service providers, and city residents to design a community engagement playbook detailing best practices for city-scale engagement. The playbook, as well as the collaborative process that produced it, provides a roadmap for thinking through the kinds of systems that might populate the design space of city-scale digital civics. This paper details our design-led research process and builds on emerging literature on designing for digital civic interaction.