Collaborative Research: HCC: Medium: Connecting Practitioners to Design: Methods and Tools for Live Participatory Design Fiction

This project will develop a novel approach to doing participatory design through live streaming media: Live Participatory Design Fiction (LPDF). Live media have the ability to stream video and afford interaction by participants. Previously, live media afforded audience participation through text-based chat.

Now, new live media forms and democratizing systems have progressively enabled viewers to participate more directly and collectively. Participatory design incorporates stakeholders in the design process to provide subject-matter expertise and surface issues; however, prior approaches work with small, co-located groups with banal results. The work draws on playing out design fiction - imagining technology futures in service to designing systems well and equitably - as part of the design process.

We can envision a future wherein live media affords participation not only for entertainment, but to shape the future of a specific design, a field, or an entire industry. Further, rendering a design fiction system into an interactive artifact holds promise to make these imagined systems more real for potential users.

The objective of this project is to establish new methodologies that broaden participation of diverse stakeholders in designing new technologies, enabling participatory design at scale while evaluating how best to use live data to iterate designs and uncover design principles for live media collaboration and active involvement. To better support building future systems for specialized, geographically distributed populations, innovative and realistic simulation methods and tools will be developed.

LPDF will facilitate participatory design at distance and scale by asking participants to play out a role in a design fiction, in this case one focused on the future of information technology in emergency management. This project will iteratively develop LPDF methods and tools, building on an existing live media platform. In parallel, it will develop scenarios, grounded in practice, for design fictions to be developed within the emergency management domain to foster technology integration and influence systems being designed on other projects.

The project's broader impacts will come through releasing and promoting open-source tools for doing LPDF that support designers and researchers, impacting emergency management practice through system designs, releasing reusable scenarios based on practice, and developing educational resources for doing LPDF in conference courses and college classes.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.