Of late, there has been a renewed and reinvigorated exchange of ideas across science and technology studies and participatory design, emerging from a shared interest in 'publics'. In this article, we explore the role of participatory design in constituting publics, drawing together recent scholarship in both science and technology studies and participatory design. To frame our discussion, we present two case studies of community-based participatory design as empirical examples. From these examples and the literature, we discuss the ways in which the concepts of infrastructuring and attachments are central to the constitution of publics. Finally, through an analysis of our case studies, we consider the differences between the practices of enabling participation and infrastructuring, calling attention to the ways that constituting publics foregrounds an engagement with authority structures and unknown futures through the participatory design process.

This paper is about the work we do to create productive partnerships in community settings: developing relationships, demonstrating commitments, and overcoming personal and institutional barriers to community-based design research. Through an ethnographic account of the elements of community-based research normally elided from reports of design process, we explore how the impact of institutional histories and personal relationships went beyond simply identifying potential partners, but fundamentally guided the research questions and approach. We examine the different roles researchers play-researcher, confidant, advocate, interloper, invader, and collaborator-and how those roles create particular relations in the field. The contribution of this work is the development of a reflective account of the research in order to evaluate knowledge production, rigor, and advance methods for engaging in community-based research.

The participation of a large and varied group of people in the planning process has long been encouraged to increase the effectiveness and acceptability of plans. However, in practice, participation by affected stakeholders has often been limited to small groups, both because of the lack of reach on the part of planners and because of a sense of little or no ownership of the process on the part of citizens. Overcoming these challenges to stakeholder participation is particularly important for any transportation planning process because the success of the system depends primarily on its ability to cater to the requirements and preferences of the people whom the system serves. Crowdsourcing uses the collective wisdom of a crowd to achieve a solution to a problem that affects the crowd. This paper proposes the use of crowdsourcing as a possible mechanism to involve a large group of stakeholders in transportation planning and operations. Multiple case studies show that crowdsourcing was used to collect data from a wide range of stakeholders in transportation projects. Two distinct crowdsourcing usage types are identified: crowdsourcing for collecting normally sparse data on facilities such as bike routes and crowdsourcing for soliciting feedback on transit quality of service and real-time information quality. A final case study exemplifies the use of data quality auditors for ensuring the usability of crowd-sourced data, one of many potential issues in crowdsourcing presented in the paper. These case studies show that crowdsourcing has immense potential to replace or augment traditional ways of collecting data and feedback from a wider group of a transportation system's users without creating an additional financial burden.

The Value Sensitive Design (VSD) methodology provides a comprehensive framework for advancing a value-centered research and design agenda. Although VSD provides helpful ways of thinking about and designing value-centered computational systems, we argue that the specific mechanics of VSD create thorny tensions with respect to value sensitivity. In particular, we examine limitations due to value classifications, inadequate guidance on empirical tools for design, and the ways in which the design process is ordered. In this paper, we propose ways of maturing the VSD methodology to overcome these limitations and present three empirical case studies that illustrate a family of methods to effectively engage local expressions of values. The findings from our case studies provide evidence of how we can mature the VSD methodology to mitigate the pitfalls of classification and engender a commitment to reflect on and respond to local contexts of design.

Digital civics research seeks to understand how technology can create new forms of relationships and services between public officials and citizens in governance. To accomplish this, design in digital civics emphasizes the importance of relationships based on dialogue, empowerment, and participation; all of which are contingent upon the existence of trust. Currently, however, these relationships are most often characterized by entrenched distrust which problematizes opportunities for dialogue and participation. In this paper, we explore how design might support trust in the relational aims of digital civics. To do so, we led 13 public officials in a large US city through a design-based inquiry centered around the role of trust in their various efforts to engage communities. In our findings, we discuss four strategies for supporting trust in digital civics.

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An exploration of design considerations in the design of technologies that support local collective action. Contemporary computing technologies have thoroughly embedded themselves in every aspect of modern life—conducting commerce, maintaining and extending our networks of friends, and mobilizing political movements all occur through a growing collection of devices and services designed to keep and hold our attention. Yet what happens when our attention needs to be more local, collective, and focused on our immediate communities? Perhaps more important, how can we imagine and create new technologies with local communities? In Designing Publics, Christopher Le Dantec explores these questions by designing technologies with the urban homeless. Drawing on a case study of the design of a computational infrastructure in a shelter for homeless women and their children, Le Dantec theorizes an alternate vision of design in community contexts. Focusing on collective action through design, Le Dantec investigates the way design can draw people together on social issues and create and sustain a public. By “designing publics” he refers both to the way publics arise out of design intervention and to the generative action publics take—how they “do design” as they mobilize and act in the world. This double lens offers a new view of how design and a diverse set of design practices circulate in sites of collective action rather than commercial production.

One subclass of human computation applications are those directed at tasks that involve planning (e.g. tour planning) and scheduling (e.g. conference scheduling). Interestingly, work on these systems shows that even primitive forms of automated oversight on the human contributors helps in significantly improving the effectiveness of the humans/crowd. In this paper, we argue that the automated oversight used in these systems can be viewed as a primitive automated planner, and that there are several opportunities for more sophisticated automated planning in effectively steering crowdsourced planning. Straightforward adaptation of current planning technology is however hampered by the mismatch between the capabilities of human workers and automated planners. We identify and address two important challenges that need to be overcome before such adaptation of planning technology can occur: (i) interpreting inputs of the human workers (and the requester) and (ii) steering or critiquing plans produced by the human workers, armed only with incomplete domain and preference models. To these ends, we describe the implementation of AI-MIX, a plan generation system that uses automated checks and alerts to improve the quality of plans created by human workers.