Civic Futuremaking: Social Network Participatory Design With Youth

• In Event: Social Movements, Learning Sciences, and Possibilities for Transformation

Abstract

Purpose
Scholars use the terms participatory politics to describe forms of online youth civic engagement that blur the boundaries between cultural production and activism (Cohen & Kahne, 2012; Soep, 2014; Ito et al, 2015). To what extent are these civic activities constrained by platforms that have been created without youth input? What if young people were empowered and supported to design a networked platform that enables them to define their own civic identities, strategies and goals? This poster explores how participatory design can be leveraged in processes of infrastructuring youth civic action.

Methods and Data
A Chicago-based project engages youth in participatory design processes to develop safe, active and sustainable online space in which youth can create, share, and discuss media, build relationships, and deepen their civic engagement. The Youth Editorial Board (YEB) comprising teens and young adults from different youth media organizations has been the driving force for the site’s vision, culture, design, and function. As of Summer 2015, 60 youth have participated in 165 hours of ongoing, iterative, participatory-design workshops, led by design professionals, youth media organizers and learning scientists. In these workshops, youth engage in human-centered design activities, such as creating personas, use-case scenarios, and mood boards. They also develop and moderate activity on the platform by facilitating user-testing sessions, monitoring discussions on featured media pieces, and creating original content. As co-facilitator and researcher-in-residence, I draw on workshop observations, web activity, collaboratively produced design prototypes, and youth-authored reflections to understand the complex process of working together to design youth-centered networked cultures.

Perspectives
Using theories of participatory design as “infrastructuring” of social relations (Björgvinsson, Ehn, Hillgren, 2012; Ehn, Nilsson, Topgaard, 2014; Light & Akoma, 2014), I examine the mechanisms involved in building the necessary social foundations for civic action. By infrastructures, I mean the “boring and invisible things” (Star, 2002) that social movements (and other relations) run on: respect and trust, mutual care, ability to acknowledge assumptions and negotiate differences, and willingness to form commitments to shared futures. Since today’s civic movements are deeply embedded within digital media cultures, these infrastructures must seen as socio-material assemblages – collectives of humans, institutions and technologies that emerge and evolve in use.

Results and Significance
I argue that the YEB workshops constitute futuremaking practices: design activities and anticipatory simulations that support groups to affectively experience different possible futures together and develop designs to realize them. Specifically, workshops create the conditions to surface existing socio-technical infrastructures, examine ways in which they enable or constrain certain kinds of civic actions, re-imagine and enact new structures based on the group’s community visions and commitments, and translate these offline encounters into designs for virtual collective activity. Through cycles of asking, listening, developing, prototyping, testing, abandoning and iterating the platform, its policies and features, the project team prioritizes ways these collectives can be assembled to reflect ethics of care, interdependency and social justice throughout the course of many transformations. The affective commitments formed in this process to alternative social imaginaries motivate the youth participants towards ongoing collective action.

Author

• Natalia Smirnov, Northwestern University