There has been a recent shift in England towards empowering citizens to shape their neighbourhoods. However, current methods of participation are unsuitable or unwieldy for many people. In this paper, we report on ChangeExplorer, a smart watch application to support citizen feedback, to investigate the extent to which digital wearables can address barriers to participation in planning. The research contributes to both technology-mediated citizen involvement and urban planning participation methods. The app leverages in-situ, quick interactions encouraging citizens to reflect and comment on their environment. Taking a case study approach, the paper discusses the design and deployment of the app in a local planning authority through interviews with 19 citizens and three professional planners. The paper discusses the potential of the ChangeExplorer app to address more conceptual issues, and concludes by assessing the degree to which the technology raises awareness of urban change and whether it could serve as a gateway to more meaningful participatory methods.

Enhancing the role of citizens in shaping places has been a longstanding objective for governments, communities and the academy. Although a range of techniques has been developed by the state to give people an opportunity to get involved, these methods often struggle to create a meaningful way to communicate aspirations for places on citizens' terms. In this paper, we document the design, deployments and evaluation of a new technological device that enabled participants to share place views and aspirations beyond more traditional government engagement methods. The device, called JigsAudio, is an open-source device fabricated by the authors that encourages people to express themselves creatively through drawing and talking. The research contributes to our understanding of how accessible and free technologies can reduce barriers to participation, whilst encouraging creativity and expression when talking about the future of places. It goes on to discuss the potential of devices such as JigsAudio conceptually and practically within urban and regional change, and considers the balance that needs to be struck between utilising smart technology whilst creating accessible and meaningful opportunities that inspire citizens.

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On the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (IDEVASW), sex worker rights advocates and support services commemorate lives lost due to violence. In this paper we describe and reflect on a Feminist Participatory Action Research project that supported the activities of IDEVASW over two years in North East England. Working alongside a charity that provides services to women who are sex workers or have experienced sexual exploitation, we coorganised the first activist march on the day. As researchers and service providers, we present detailed reflections on the use of digital technologies during the public activist march, a private service for commemoration, and the development of a semi-public archive to collect experiences of the day. We develop three implications for the design of digital technologies for activism and the commemoration of lost lives: as catalysts for reflection and opportunities to layer experience.

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Extant literature associates the central purpose of open strategizing with organizations seeking to manage legitimacy (e.g. Chesbrough & Appleyard, 2007; Whittington, Cailluet & Yakis-Douglas, 2011; Dobusch, Dobusch & Muller-Seitz, 2017). To date, legitimacy has been highlighted as a potential 'effect' (Gegenhuber & Dobusch, 2017) or 'outcome' (Luedicke, Husemann, Furnari & Ladstaetter, 2017) of strategic openness. Absent has been research attempting to understand open strategy as a process of legitimation (Uberbacher, 2014), and there remains a need to elevate the potential of open strategy for managing legitimacy further. To address this gap, the research presented here adopts a longitudinal, single case analysis to explore a professional association who developed a new four-year strategic plan using an open strategy approach. The findings indicate how open strategy dynamics represent the case organization switching between distinct approaches to legitimation, to manage competing stakeholder demands. The research offers an important contribution by accentuating the principal relevance of organizational legitimacy in open strategizing. This brings open strategy into close alignment with organizational legitimacy literature and its theoretical

HCI has a tradition of engaging in democratic practices and contributing to public service innovation. Working with complex socio-political realities presents significant challenges for HCI researchers, which are amplified by the current democratic and economic crisis. In this article, we present insights from a longitudinal study where we worked with multiple stakeholders in the context of an austerity-driven transformation of public parks service in a city in the North East of England. Over the course of 20 months, we developed a participatory socio-technical process designed to create collaborative spaces between communities and institutions to re-envision and re-shape the city's public parks service. The study contributes to HCI research concerned with developing tools and processes that aim at connecting across the boundaries between communities and institutions. Our process and the resulting analysis expose the practical complexities of transformation and co-creation processes and the troubles that come with opening spaces for wider participation within highly contested and political settings. We provide an orientation for HCI design research aspiring to contribute to social innovation and democratic practices in troubled times.

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