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Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight
compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction
design field as a whole. Christopher A. Le Dantec, Editor
Digital Civics:
Taking a Local Turn
Patrick Olivier and Peter Wright, Newcastle University
We work at Culture Lab, Newcastle
Universitys cross-faculty digital technology
research center. Newcastle is a flourishing
research-focused university; our motto is
Excellence with a purpose and our vicechancellor urges us to ask ourselves not
what are we good at, but what are we good
for? This connects with our strategic vision
to be a civic university that is embedded in,
and responsive to, its local context. The
civic university agenda is reflected in our
three societal challenge themes, aging,
social renewal, and sustainability, which are
the focus of a significant proportion of our
research funding.
The universitys success comes at a
time of economic crisis and austerity in
the U.K., with local councils being
required to make drastic cuts to public
services. For example, one
of our local councils responsible for more
than 190,000 residents has had to make
37 million ($57 million) in reductions in
the latest round of public
expenditure cuts, yet it is responsible for
providing vital services such as waste
management, transport, pre-university
education, and social care. As humancentered computing researchers at
a successful civic university, we are
therefore compelled to ask ourselves how
our digital research could be of use and
value to local councils and local citizens.
Much of this work has been undertaken
through big initiatives such as our SIDE
Research Hub (Social Inclusion through the
Digital Economy). As our publications over
the period testify, we have explored areas
including dementia care, chronic disease,
mental health, primary and secondary
education, social and community care, and
local democracy. Our human-centered
and participatory approaches have
helped us connect with individuals and
communities, providing a rich
understanding of the challenges our
participants face, while at the same time
returning to them systems and services that
we hoped were meaningful and helpful to
them.
But in 2012, we got a wake-up call.
Chris Csikszentmihlyi, whom we had
invited to Newcastle to give a
keynote address at the ACM Designing
Interactive Systems (DIS) conference,
presented an array of a brilliantly conceived
and executed civic media projects. These
projects addressed political concerns, gave a
voice to under-represented communities, and
opened up agonistic design spaces. But most
significant for us was his challenge that
Insights
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civics
aims
to
create
relational
rather
than
transactional public services.
FROM CONSUMERS
TO CITIZENS
Culture Lab has enjoyed significant funding
from our national research councils to
explore how ubiquitous and social
computing can be used to address the
universitys societal challenges.
Digital
A key challenge for digital civics is to move
beyond volunteerism
toward a model of citizen-led
service commissioning.
Relational models of public services are best realized
through long-term engagements with the full range of local
we should stop designing for consumers and
start designing for citizens. We had never
thought in these terms before, and it led us
to critically question not only the impact of
our research on the people and place where
we reside, but also the relationships between
local citizens and our research group, our
faculty, and our civic university. What we
came to realize was that despite our
commitment to human-centered and
participatory processes, we might as well be
doing our research anywhere. Although our
focus was on individuals and communities,
the things we were doing often failed to
extend beyond the confines of our projects.
Worse than this, the way in which we were
conducting some of our research
with our clinical and education collaborators
meant that we were proliferating the
received wisdom, standard procedures, and
institutional norms that limited peoples
ability to exercise control over their own
lives, to organize, and to help each other.
The way we were designing technology
gave people some input into the design of
products, but only within the traditional
framing of health, social care, and education
as something that is done to citizens. For
example, we were not using technology to
give people a voice in the commissioning of
services that local government or the
National Health Service provided to them.
We were not offering alternatives to
traditional top-down consultation
mechanisms. We were not providing support
for people to deliberate on matters of
concern, express their collective views, or
instill in people confidence
stakeholders.
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that their voices would be listened to. We
now call this endeavor digital civics , as it
uses digital technologies to truly empower
citizens.
DIGITAL CIVICS RESEARCH
AT CULTURE LAB
In 2014, the U.K.s Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council
awarded us funding to establish the
Centre for Doctoral Training in Digital
Civics. The center will train 55
postdoctoral researchers over the next
eight years to carry out an extended
program of digital civics
projects. Mindful of the shortcomings of
our previous work, we established the
center as a close partnership
with our local councils, a number of
regional NGOs, and businesses. The
program is designed so that researchers are
required to work with local communities
and councils in four areas of service
provision: education, public health, social
care, and local democracy.
Traditional thinking in public service
provision casts citizens as service
consumers, local government as
information producers, and digital
technology as a broadcast information
medium. Our vision for digital civics is
that by working with councils and citizens
on locally embedded and responsive
demonstrator projects, we can create a
participatory imaginary in which both
citizens and local government can explore
the value
of an alternative model of service
provision. This alternative moves away
from consumer-producer relations toward
the idea of local governments providing
participatory platforms, platforms through
which citizens
can take a more active role in shaping
agendas, make decisions about service
provision, and play a more central role in
making such provisions sustainable and
resilient. In addition, such platforms will
create possibilities for new forms of
relationship between citizens, local
councils, NGOs, and
businesses. Realizing such an imaginary and
changing these relationships is
not going to happen overnight. It will
require sustained effort to support citizen
groups and organizations by giving them
the skills and technologies to engage and
form public relationships with those in
power, and to give
them evidence that it is worth the
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FeedFinder.
effort. Likewise, it will require local
governments to develop new skills and
methods of working with citizens,
methods that move beyond traditional
scripted processes of consultation toward
more open dialogue.
In these times of austerity, there is a
risk that digital civics might be
construed, on the one hand, as finding
ways of making citizens do it for
themselves, or on the other hand, as
dismantling public service provision.
This is not our vision. As Harry C. Boyte
in his inspiring book Everyday Politics
argues, digital civics is about a new
configuration of government and
citizenry, one that is relational rather
than transactional, and in which political
thinking and action can be co-produced and
co-owned through dialogue across
differences in experience, values, and
knowledge [1]. In what follows, we describe
two projects that represent some baby steps
toward a digital civics: FeedFinder and App
Movement.
FEEDFINDER
The promotion of breastfeeding is a
major issue for U.K. public health
practitioners, and of particular
concern in the Northeast of England,
where only 32 percent of mothers use
breast milk after six to eight weeks, the
lowest average in the country. Madeline
Balaam, from our group, in
Feedfinder location reviews.
consultation with local public health
providers and midwifery services,
undertook to research this issue and
explore ways in which digital civics
could respond to this challenge. She
worked with 21 young mothers from
diverse socioeconomic backgrounds in a
series of workshops in which the women
shared and discussed their
experiences of breastfeeding, especially
outside the home. The workshops revealed
that as a result of public health campaigns,
the media, and contact with local service
providers, young mothers often experience
moral pressure
to breastfeed because it is strongly
linked with the idea of being a good
mother. Furthermore, breastfeeding is
often promoted as the natural and
trouble-free method. But in reality, as
some of Madelines participants
confirmed, many women experience
practical difficulties with breastfeeding,
especially during the first few weeks
of a babys life, and they have concerns
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about where they can breastfeed when out
of the home.
In response to the workshops, Madeline
and her team developed FeedFinder, a
location-based review app for breastfeeding
mothers (https:// [Link]) [2].
FeedFinder allows mothers to rate and
review public places (cafes, parks,
department stores, etc.) where they have
breastfed, to share this information with
other app-using mothers, and to make it
public through the app and website.
FeedFinder was released onto the
app store and Google Play in summer 2013
with a small local promotional campaign at
the end of July. Within the first six weeks,
1,450 users signed up, and 921 reviews were
added. At press time, it has been running
over 18 months and has 5,000 users. Over
1,900 places have been rated and 1,810
reviews posted. We are not claiming that
FeedFinder is the total solution to getting
young mothers to breastfeed. Rather, it is a
demonstration of how social media can be
used not just to broadcast public health
information to consumers, but also to draw
upon the expertise and experience of citizens
themselves to create and maintain a trusted
information service around an issue of
importance to them.
APP MOVEMENT
FeedFinder is a digital civics success for
us, but it still embodies a model of
citizenship in which citizens volunteer
their time and effort in response to
someone elses initiative. Our next
challenge is to consider how we can go
beyond this model and give citizens
control over the services that get
commissioned in the first place.
One response to this challenge is our
latest digital civics platform, App
Movement. App Movement allows
individuals to propose their own locationbased service (or movement) around an issue
that is important to them ([Link] The movement might be
anything from dog-friendly shops to childfriendly streets. Citizens describe their
proposal, and
if they can recruit 50 supporters, then the
movement shifts into a design phase in
which the supporters customize the rating
criteria, brand, look and feel,
and so on. Following the design phase, a
new app incorporating these design choices
is automatically generated and uploaded to
the app stores. Through their engagement in
the design phase, the movements supporters
constitute a ready-made and highly
motivated community of interest who
populate the app with its start-up data.
Our App Movement website went public
in February 2015, but already a number of
proposed movements have received
significant public support. For example, an
idea for a dementia-friendly places
movement was posted which posed the
question, How can we design or shape
outside places, such as our cities or our
neighborhoods, to support people with
dementia to continue to use and enjoy
them? The proposal received 87 supporters
within the first week. Of interest were the
comments that the proposal provoked.
These included recommendations for
places, We have recently discovered a
brilliant cafe in Dunston we take my dad
there as often as we can, it is accessible,
friendly and very understanding
of my dads condition specific
suggestions for improvements to the urban
environment, It would ideal if there were
clear signage on dementia friendly shops,
cafes etc as well as clear evidence of
networking the idea, Katie, I think there
could be a lot of interest in this. I will pass
it on through my networks and ask people
to get back in touch with you. The app
went through its design phase in March and
is now available in the App store (search for
Care Connect Dementia).
DIGITAL CIVICS AND
THE CIVIC UNIVERSITY
Our digital civics program is just starting;
we not are proposing that FeedFinder and
App Movement or our other pilot
platforms (see http:// [Link]) are the
panacea for digital citizenship. Indeed,
they are at most
a toe in the water through which we
hope to stimulate discussion and
imagination. One of the great values of
our Digital Civics Centre is its eight-year
timescale. A key feature of success for us
will not simply be doing great research that
we can share at SIGCHI venues,
but also developing partnerships with
local government, local businesses,
NGOs, and communities in the region. It
is only through developing these longterm relationships that the potential of
digital technology to offer new relational
models of local government can be
realized. There will be challenges and
opportunities here too for the university.
Even with its vision of itself as a civic
university, engagement is sometimes
construed as technology transfer,
translational research, or knowledge
exchange, all of which are easily
misunderstood as academia producing
knowledge to be consumed by citizens,
businesses, and government, rather than
as citizens,
business, and government co-producing and
co-owning knowledge (and technology). Its
a shift in thinking that has the power to
fundamentally reshape the relationship
between the university and the city [3].
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research reported here was funded by
the RCUK Research Hub on Social
Inclusion through the Digital Economy
(SiDE; [Link]
Endnotes
1. Boyte, H.C. Everyday Politics: Reconnecting
Citizens and Public Life. Univ. of Pennsylvania
Press, Philadelphia, 2004.
2. Balaam, M., Comber, R., Jenkins, E., Sutton,
S., and Garbett, A. FeedFinder: A locationmapping mobile application
for breastfeeding women. Proc. of ACM
SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing. ACM Press, New York, 2014.
3. Goddard, J. and Valance, P. The University and
the City. Routledge, London, 2014.
Patrick Olivier is Professor of HumanComputer Interaction and co-director of the
EPSRC Centre for Digital Civics at Newcastle
University. He is interested in the application
of social and ubiquitous computing to health,
social care, and education.
[Link]@[Link]
Pete Wright is Professor of Social Computing
and co- director of the EPSRC Centre for Digital
Civics at Newcastle University. His research area
is the human-centered and participatory design
of digital systems. He
is best known for Technology as Experience
(MIT Press, 2004), Experience-Centred Design
(Morgan Claypool, 2010), and Taking [A]Part
(MIT Press, 2015).
[Link]@[Link]
DOI: 10.1145/2776885 COPYRIGHT HELD BY AUTHORS. PUBLICATION RIGHTS LICENSED TO ACM. $15.00
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