Participatory Design, beyond the local

Four EU Horizon2020 CAPS projects, commonfare, empatia, MAZI, and netCommons, collaborate in the organization of a workshop titled "Participation Design, beyond the local", hosted at the 8th conference on Community & Technologies, June 26-30, Troyes, France.

The workshop aims at stimulating and opening a debate around the capacity of Participatory Design (PD) and other co-design approaches to deliver outcomes and methodologies that can have an impact and value for reuse well beyond the local context in which they were originally developed.

Projects like the CAPS pose new questions to PD and, more generally, to any co-design endeavor. The main concerns probably consist in the scalability of participatory practices and their results. How can PD processes and outcomes scale up and become relevant in different situations, beyond the local? How can PD activities and results impact the supra-national and supra-local level? How the circulation of information and knowledge can reach beyond single, and often localized, communities of participants?

Objectives and participation
The overall objective of the workshop is to build a community of researchers and practitioners – working in the field of PD, interaction design and similar approaches – who are going beyond the local in their professional practice and wish to explore the limits and challenges of their activity through comparisons, critical analysis, and storytelling, with the will to outgo their own disciplinary perspectives.

More specifically, we would like to invite papers that can contribute to the discussion about PD beyond the local in different ways:

1. presenting success stories of knowledge circulation either in terms of processes or outcomes in PD and beyond;
2. discussing and consolidating acommon grammar of PD between a variety of disciplinary viewpoints;
3. discussing theoretical aspects of the problem of knowledge circulation between different local contexts or different projects;
4. discussing the problem ofgoing beyond the local from diverse disciplinary viewpoints as varied as software engineering, architecture, community informatics, urban planning, sociology, political sciences, anthropology, etc.;
5. introducing novel PD projects and methodologies that try to achieve explicitly or implicitly the objective of going beyond the local;
6. comparing approaches and methodologies from different disciplinary perspectives.

As an outcome of this workshop, the organizers would like to collect the best contributions in a shared publication, whose venue will be identified collectively during the workshop.

Submission
Position papers (1-2 pages according to the conference template) must be submitted by e-mail at participatory-design@capssi.eu. Submissions will be evaluated based on their relevance to the workshop objectives and the diversity of perspectives that they bring.

Important dates
- Submission deadline: 30 May 2017
- Notification of acceptance: 2 June 2017
- Workshop: 27 June 2017

Organizing committee
- Maurizio Teli, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute
- Panayotis Antoniadis, NetHood Zurich
- Chiara Bassetti, University of Trento
- Stefano De Paoli, Abertay University
- Ileana Apostol, NetHood Zurich
- Giovani Allegretti, Centre for Social Studies (CES) - University of Coimbra
- Michelangelo Secchi, Centre for Social Studies (CES) - University of Coimbra