Tag: Participatory Design

Research Sharing at ITU

On the 23rd May, our Interest Group on Commons and Commoning held two round table sessions at the biennial Research Sharing Day event organized by ITU.

In the two sessions, we had guests primarily from the Design and Business IT Departments, but also some curious bystanders passing by from Computer Science. Here, we tried explain and summarize what our approach to design and commons involve and what we have been doing over the past few years – from workshops work (e.g. PDC2020, PDC2022), reading group, and the podcast.

However, the most fun and interesting parts were certainly those were we engaged in discussions with our guests about: what they understand as commons, how they try to work with or incorporate commons in their research or teaching work, and what kind of research and societal value they see in such an approach.

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A pluriversal card-deck on commoning and design

On the 16th June we held the main and closing session of the Commoning Design and Designing Commons workshop for the Participatory Design Conference 2020.

PDC Workshop

Ahead of the session, we split into four groups of four people and, through some asynchronous collaboration, we started bringing up keywords inspired by each others’ position statements. On the 16th, a half day of collaborative brainstorming and writing took place supported by etherpad, onlyoffice, and our adaptation of Zoom’s “Breakout rooms” to allow virtual room hopping in a manner loosely inspired by the Open Space Technology method. We enriched and better delineated the content of what we called a pluriversal card deck on the topic of commoning and design, by building on those initial keywords.

Workshop artifactThe card deck includes definitions of terms and practices that populate commons discourse, as well as few concrete examples of commoning and PD initiatives in this area. We consider this card deck to be open and pluriversal because:

  • we will release it under permissive commons-oriented licenses, and we both aim and hope for a community of scholars, practitioners, commoners to use and continue contributing to such card deck even after the release of v1.0 🙂
  • it tries to represent the plurality of experiences, interpretations, definitions, and meanings that characterize commons and designing for the diverse group of workshop participants.

8.12.2020 UDATE: After some post-production work by the workshop organisers in order to polish the content and layout of the card-deck, as well as to decide the last practicalities with the workshop participants, we are happy to say that v2 of the Commoning Design Pluriversal card deck is out! More information here 🙂