This paper engages with issues of universality and locality in the context of community-based participatory design (PD), and focuses on the challenges and opportunities associated with incorporating local views and forms of participation in the design process. The notion of 'designing for participation' is advanced as a quintessential perspective for approaches in which design practices are re-configured from a community-centric standpoint. Building on insights from PD and community development studies, as well as on empirical evidence from two community design studies, we argue that designing for participation appears to be located in a space between the designer's and local views of participation, which are at times both ambiguous and conflicting. To overcome these tensions, we argue for the importance of engaging critically and reflectively with PD in community contexts, and in this process capitalising on disciplinary dialogues that can expand the viewpoint from which PD projects are negotiated and evaluated.

This paper introduces PoliCultura, a project created by Politecnico di Milano for the Italian schools, which has just completed three years of deployment. Participating classes (with pupils aged between 4 and 18 years) are required to create their own multimedia story, using an authoring-delivery environment (1001stories) provided by Politecnico di Milano. PoliCultura has offered us the opportunity to investigate the prolonged use of digital storytelling authoring tools as a whole-class educational activity in a wide number of real educational settings: approximately 7,620 pupils from 381 classes have been involved in this project since its birth in 2006. From the overall PoliCultura experience and from the wide amount of qualitative and quantitative data collected from participants though online surveys, focus groups, interviews and contextual inquiry activities, we have learned a number of lessons that we discuss in the paper.

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The museum world is rapidly changing from being collection-centred to being community-centred and for the public. Apart from broadening access to collections through, for example, digitisation initiatives, new ways of involving the public more meaningfully and at various levels have emerged. Experiences inside museums have become more engaging, by extending the experience beyond the physical visit, or by involving the public in various forms of crowdsourced stewardship of collections. In this book, we explore the design implications that go along with these developments, all concerned with diversifying and making the engagement of the public in museum experiences more rewarding. We focus on the design implications associated with museums reaching out to crowds beyond their local communities, on experimenting with novel technologies and on conceiving experiences embedded in connected museum systems and large institutional ecosystems. By looking at and reflecting on trends, we attempt to sketch a picture of how future museums will change and, particularly, how they will relate to their public as a result of responding to or embracing these trends.

Since the nineties, storytelling has received increasing attention in the HCI, IDC, and AI communities, exploring the potential of interactivity and multimedia as a means to promote engagement, enjoyment, fun, to foster new forms of children's creativity, and to increase the educational benefits of traditional storytelling for this target group. The time seems right to look at the field with critical eyes and validate the claims put forward regarding the positive effects of interactive storytelling technology for children, as well as the effectiveness of existing design and evaluation approaches. The purpose of this full-day IDC 2010 workshop is to bring together researchers from a wide spectrum of disciplines who share a common interest in understanding these challenges and to create a research agenda that can orient application and theory in the domain of interactive storytelling for children.

There is a growing interest in the use of collaborative technologies for education. However, their adoption and implementation in formal education is still lagging behind. One feature of cooperative technologies makes them particularly unusable in classroom settings: most tools, environments and interfaces for co-located collaboration are designed to support the interaction of small groups rather than entire classes. This paper proposes 'collective digital storytelling' as a way to engage whole classes into activities that provide substantial educational benefits. The paper draws on empirical data from a large-scale digital storytelling project in Italy, in its fourth year of implementation, and examines several aspects and benefits related to the use of digital storytelling in formal education, focusing upon two specific issues:(1) how digital storytelling can engage the whole class, rather than individuals or small groups and (2) how digital storytelling can be integrated in the curricular activities, generating substantial learning benefits.

This article draws on the results of a long-term, design-based research study with South African primary school teachers to discuss the role of subjectively assigned meanings and symbolisms of technology, as key factors affecting the adoption, appropriation and use of educational technology in urban poor and under-resourced environments. The paper examines how teachers’ engagements with technology are framed, conditioned, and embedded in multi-levelled “technology encounters”. These encounters give rise to meaningful representations of technology that ultimately transform both the teaching and learning process, and culminate in the emergence of “symbolic narratives”: complex assemblages of symbolisms, meanings and interpretations that arise through and therefore come to influence further technology engagements. We argue that a closer examination of teachers’ symbolic narratives can shed light on the motivations that underpin the appropriation, integration -- or conversely, rejection -- of educational technology in urban poor and under-resourced environments.

In this paper, we introduce intersubjective ethics as an approach to ethical practice in community-based research. We argue for the need to think of ethics as an evolving process that is inseparable from the research endeavour, and that dwells on relationships and dialogues among researchers and community members. At the core of our approach is 'intersubjectivity' and the related notions of 'critical subjectivity' and 'critical intersubjectivity'; concepts which are central to participatory inquiry but resonate equally with critical theory and constructivism. The paper describes and exemplifies key characteristics of intersubjective ethics and its relation with research. Furthermore, we introduce key elements that can sensitise the researcher-practitioner to the principles of intersubjective ethics and how to put it in practice in community-based research, by cultivating qualities of self-reflexivity and critical (inter)subjectivity.