Designing Publics by Christopher A. Le Dantec

Author:Christopher A. Le Dantec
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2016-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

Mothers: Developing New Commitments

While at the shelter, the residents’ commitments to different issues followed an arc. Initially, as they arrived in the midst of crisis, they were singularly committed to stabilizing their situation and caring for the immediate needs of their families. Over the handful of weeks they spent at the shelter, the residents would develop commitments to each other and to the community that was present at the shelter—the staff as well as the stream of volunteers who arrived each night to prepare and serve meals to the families. Traversing this arc from crisis to experienced community member inculcated a sense of responsibility to—a commitment to—fellow residents and a desire to help the families newly arrived and disoriented. In turn, the process of co-design and of reflecting on the early prototypes was shaped by where the particular generation of mothers was along this arc. In the initial days of co-design, the participatory activities were focused primarily on building an understanding of design as an activity and practice they were capable of contributing to, of undermining my own authority as an outside expert, and drawing out their willingness to participate. The next step was to create a sense of empowerment so the mothers would engage critically with the design, relying on their experience as a valid perspective from which to critique design ideas. The final step was to arrive at a situation in which the residents had integrated the technology into their practices at the shelter, which articulated new commitments to each other, the staff, and the community.

The staff mostly encountered the technology through the Message Center in which they sent messages directly to the residents or added items to the Shared Message Board (see figure 4.1). For the residents, the messages received via the Message Center were viewed simply as messages from the staff and were not attributed specifically to technology we were co-designing;5 the technology disappeared and the content being transmitted was the focal point. The most conspicuous encounter with the technology for the residents was with the Shared Message Board: it was a large screen placed at the entrance to the shelter, just above a table where the residents had to sign in every evening when they arrived. Locating the Shared Message Board so prominently was intentional, following guidance from the staff and residents, in order to draw attention to the information added to the board. While the initial goals of the Shared Message Board were to provide a visible place for both staff and residents to share information, as the design and deployment of the technology matured, the interface grew into a mechanism for surfacing common issues and enacting new attachments.

To illustrate this, a message was posted to the board during an incident when some residents were not completing their chores. The conflict had been simmering for some time, with several minor confrontations between the staff and one particular resident. It finally developed to a point at which another resident felt compelled to post a public message to the Shared Message Board:6 “We came to [the shelter].

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