Participatory Design Workshop

On the 15th of August 2016 O4C Project will be running a workshop at the 14th Participatory Design Conference, in Aarhus, Denmark.

The O4C workshop: a short introduction

A large quantity of open data is now available to institutions, business and citizens. The early applications and services using open data are suggesting that the accessibility to open data could support a number of innovative services that would change the way we live our everyday working life, we use urban spaces or we mediate our social relationships. The potential of such new resource, though, has not been explored yet, also because of a lack of perspectives and scenarios on how open data can be used.

While some companies have seized the innovation opportunities offered by open data, a large part of our society is still unaware of such a new resource and does not know how this can be used.

Indeed the full deployment of this resource depends on a general capability to figure out new applications, furthermore the demand for open data will increase the accessibility to them.

The workshop aims at broadening the perspectives on the use of open data by investigating new scenarios for a wide use of open data, where citizens without any IT skills can be involved in a co-design session with the relevant stakeholders.

The workshop is inspired to the Open4Citizens project, a project aiming at empowering citizens to make meaningful use of open data. In particular the workshop will focus on the key innovation event for this project. An open hackathon, that would trigger collaboration between IT experts, citizens, interest groups, public authorities and ventures.

Unlike the most common hackathons, that are mainly open to IT experts, this form of hackathon will possibly short circuit solutions by creating mechanisms of collaboration between participants with a very different cultural background and very different skills.

This approach is also a way to change the playground of hackathon activities, from a basically technical environment, to an environment in which the needs and problem areas emerge from the real life of the non technical participants.

The support to this participatory process is the focus of this workshop.

The participants will play with some of the tool and with a general theme (collaborative inclusion of migrants into European societies), and experiment the way problems/opportunities are defined, and how possible solutions emerge, that can use open data as the main resource.

To participate

Participants from all backgrounds are welcome to join this workshop, from academics to students and practitioners working on collaborative project involving both citizens and open data experts.
To participate, please submit a 1 page (max) statement (of visuals/text or other media equivalent) to ago ( a t ) create.aau.dk including information on why you are interested in this topic and if you have any experience in working with open data, hackathons, participatory processes more in general or social innovation with regards to migration.

 

The schedule

The emerging relevance of open data is increasing the demand for services with a high intensity of data usage. Too often the solutions emerging from such projects have a high technical content, but a low social utility. This workshop will be an attempt to address the gap between the qualified technical skills required to deal with data and the qualified social skills needed to deal with social innovation.

13:00 – 13:20 Presentation of the theme

13.20 – 14:00 Self presentation of the participants

14:00 – 14:45 Working with inspiration tools

14:45 – 15:30 Reflection on inspiration tools

15:30 – 16:15 Working with ideation tools and data validation

16:15 – 17:00 Reflection on ideation and data validation

 

Important Dates (UPDATED)
Submission deadline: 01-07-2016
Notification: 15-07-2016
Workshop date: 15-08-2016

Organizers

Nicola Morelli, AAU

Amalia de Götzen, AAU

Louise Klinkaard Torntoff, AAU