This case study illustrates how migrants in Sweden were involved in the development of a new online platform Mobilearn (Mobilearn, n.d.). In particular, it shows how migrants have shaped the design of a new digital tool in collaboration with service providers from a range of public agencies. The resulting digital tool, Mobilearn, provides a number of key services tailored to the needs of migrants and helps to make public services provided to migrants more efficient. It is therefore a case study of the co-creation of a core service. Mobilearn has received multiple awards and is now being disseminated in other countries.

As we move towards exhausting our finite natural resources, generating more waste than we can absorb, and as we stare at a future with knock-on climate change within a precariously interconnected ecosystem, the question we ask within this chapter is: what role can the design of technologies play in sustaining meaningful change? We start by examining how sustainability has been framed within the broader literature, and then look more specifically within the SHCI community. The argument we advance here is twofold. The first relates to the temporality of sustainability, as seen as a process. The second relates to the interconnectedness of the endeavor, where we, who are seeking change are part and parcel of the problem. We demonstrate this via the illustrative lens of one such initiative tangled in its yearning for fairness and sustainability within the discourse of consumption and technological novelty. The metaphor offered to us by our empirical case further builds on work carried out on the “non-negotiable limits” to growth and the subsequent need for a more radical approach of activism within SHCI.

Owing to ICT-enabled citizen observatories, citizens can take on new roles in environmental monitoring, decision making and co-operative planning, and environmental stewardship. And yet implementing advanced citizen observatories for data collection, knowledge exchange and interactions to support policy objectives is neither always easy nor successful, given the required commitment, trust, and data reliability concerns. Many efforts are facing problems with the uptake and sustained engagement by citizens, limited scalability, unclear long-term sustainability and limited actual impact on governance processes. Similarly, to sustain the engagement of decision makers in citizen observatories, mechanisms are required from the start of the initiative in order to have them invest in and, hence, commit to and own the entire process. In order to implement sustainable citizen observatories, these social dimensions therefore need to be soundly managed. We provide empirical evidence of how the social dimensions of citizen observatories are being addressed in the Ground Truth 2.0 project, drawing on a range of relevant social science approaches. This project combines the social dimensions of citizen observatories with enabling technologies - via a socio-technical approach - so that their customisation and deployment is tailored to the envisaged societal and economic impacts of the observatories. The projects consists of the demonstration and validation of six scaled up citizen observatories in real operational conditions both in the EU and in Africa, with a specific focus on flora and fauna as well as water availability and water quality for land and natural resources management. The demonstration cases (4 EU and 2 African) cover the full 'spectrum' of citizen-sensed data usage and citizen engagement, and therefore allow testing and validation of the socio-technical concept for citizen observatories under a range of conditions.

The role of technological innovation within the context of governance processes is often embraced with rhetorical enthusiasm and seen as a de facto enabler for democratic decision‑making. Underpinning this enthusiasm is the leap of faith made from transparency to trust, from complexity to coherence. The belief that using new tools for e‑participation can generate dramatic transformation in public sector redesign and result in societal benefits is heralded as a shift towards public innovation. It is precisely this belief that we examine in this paper. We start our investigation by providing a conceptualization of what e‑participation means within the context of multi‑level governance. By using a cross case comparison of two European research projects, we provide an empirical base upon which we can examine the process of e‑participation and the implications of digital e‑participation tools for various levels of governance and public accountability. Furthermore we provide an interdisciplinary contribution in understanding the gap between what technological innovation makes possible and the acceptance or openness on the part of decision makers to embrace citizen input within policy processes.

Discourses on participation, democracy and politics are today profoundly questioned and challenged. Internet and the entrance of open source software into the governmental sphere have much contributed toward the shift in understandings of citizen participation, their rights and representation. In the field of participatory design such an inquiry is reflected in a shift of focus regarding the study of the use of technologies within government. From being concerned by issues on transparency and equity researchers are nowadays more prone to explore issues regarding the transformative power or/and performativity of open source software in contexts such as government. This paper describes the case of the political “Net Party” which in 2013 introduced the platform “Democracy OS” into the legislature of the Ciudad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. The question that motivates the study is: Do open source tools redefine the political space and reconfigure citizen civic participation? And if so, how? The paper contributes five analytical axes for scrutinizing the entrance of open source tools into the political space.

In Swedish the word "ting" has different meanings. It can mean "things", "matters" and "a session at court" as well as the act of appropriating space. This one-day workshop starts in the notion of the artifact as a "ting", and design as something that raises a question, provokes a discussion, and creates a public through which agonistic encounters occur. This particular lens allows us to approach design beyond 'merely producing artifacts'. Instead, we come to see it as a production of provocations, speculations, and alternative interpretations of the social world as well as new sets of relationships between participants in this public.

Because of the importance of the role and embodiment of the designer/artist in making publics, this workshop calls attention to self-reflective practices in participatory design, and questions how these practices can be embedded in the functionality of new publics and design practices.

In the age of Big Open Linked Data (BOLD), we inhabit a landscape where future scenarios are imagined, modeled, planned for and embedded in policy. Between the euphoric techno-utopian rhetoric of the boundless potential of BOLD innovations and the dystopian view of the dangers of such innovations (e.g. ubiquitous surveillance etc.), this paper offers a critical understanding of the boundaries that are traversed by the implementation of BOLD within policy modeling. We examine BOLD as a tool for imagining futures, for reducing uncertainties, for providing legitimacy and for concentrating power. In doing so we further develop the LIMITs community's conceptualization of the societal limitations on computing, with specific reference to the assumptions, interpretations and trust that we place in these models when making socio-environmental policy decisions. We use an illustrative case of policy modeling, which provides a much-needed critical discussion of the inherent limitations and risks as well as the promises that are offered by BOLD.

Caught between the infinite promise unleashed by technology proliferation and the unprecedented scale of resource depletion, waste and inequity, we inhabit a space where critical alternatives are sought more than ever. As a reflection of the above, we find in HCI, a slant towards technological fixes to existing sustainability problems, as opposed to a more holistic approach that includes behavioural and societal change. It is within this context that this paper is situated, where we propose a socio-ecological approach and argue our case for a life-cycle lens towards building systems that are in line with current understanding of the earth’s finite resources. We do so by presenting an illustrative case study of what such critical alternatives might look like, by examining the Fairphone movement. We contribute to a deeper understanding of how social value laden enterprises along with open technological design can shape sustainable relationships between our environment and us.

Research on the acceptability of assistive systems for improving the safety of powered two-wheelers (PTWs) is a pressing issue. The use of safety-enhancing assistive systems for motorised vehicles, including advanced driver assistance systems and in-vehicle information systems is widespread in many countries. Yet, there is only a limited number of equivalent intelligent transport systems (ITS) for PTWs, namely advanced rider assistance systems and on-bike information systems. This study describes the methodological development of a specific tool for assessing motorcyclists’ acceptability of ITS, as part of the motorcyclists’ profiling questionnaire (MOPROQ). There were three stages of development. First, a literature review was undertaken to assess the current state of the art regarding ITS for PTWs and to determine the most relevant facets of acceptability that should be measured. Second, a series of focus group interviews were conducted to explore riders’ attitudes towards ITS. Finally, the focus group results were used to develop a large-scale survey (MOPROQ), which was administered to an initial sample of over 6000 riders internationally. The designed tool can be used as a basis for the determination of rider acceptability of ITS systems in the future.