Improving co-design methods implies that we need to understand those methods, paying attention to not only the effect of method choices on design outcomes, but also how methods affect the people involved in co-design. In this article, we explore participants' experiences from a year-long participatory health service design project to develop 'Better Outpatient Services for Older People'. The project followed a defined method called experience-based design (EBD), which represented the state of the art in participatory service design within the UK National Health Service. A sample of participants in the project took part in semi-structured interviews reflecting on their involvement in and their feelings about the project. Our findings suggest that the EBD method that we employed was successful in establishing positive working relationships among the different groups of stakeholders (staff, patients, carers, advocates and design researchers), although conflicts remained throughout the project. Participants' experiences highlighted issues of wider relevance in such participatory design: cost versus benefit, sense of project momentum, locus of control, and assumptions about how change takes place in a complex environment. We propose tactics for dealing with these issues that inform the future development of techniques in user-centred healthcare design.

In this paper we examine what 'data literacy' -under various definitions -means at a time of persistent distribution of 'dis-/mis-/mal-information' via digital media. The paper first explores the definition of literacies (written, media, information, digital and data literacies) considering the various parameters and considerations they have gone through. We then examine the intersection of dis-/mis-/mal-information and 'fake-news' and these literacies. The paper explores what types of literacies are needed today and the important role of variations in citizens' social context. We highlight three main gaps in current data literacy frameworks -1. going beyond the individual; 2. critical thinking of the online ecosystem; and 3. designing skills for proactive citizens. We discuss these gaps while highlighting how we integrated these into our survey of UK citizens' data literacies as part of our Nuffield Foundation funded project -Me and My Big Data. By discussing our theoretical and methodological challenges we aim to shed light on not only how the definition of data literacy changes but also how we can develop education programmes that take into account information distortions and put proactive citizens at the centre.

This paper takes a national perspective on issues of digital media use. The paper draws upon the OfCom Media Literacy 2013 survey to explore how digital media use varies in regard to two major social variables – class and age. Both class and age feature predominantly in UK policy on digital access and use. Class and age are invoked as either things that create barriers to access or as issues to be addressed and managed through using digital media. Despite the large body of work on the ‘digital divide’ there is a more limited literature that explicitly addresses class. The paper seeks to act as an empirical reference point for the development of further debate around the links between class and digital media use. The paper presents a factor analysis of the OfCom data that identifies five main areas of digital media use. These five factors are then subjected to a multiple analysis of variance to explore the effects across, between and within age and class categories. A cluster analysis based on the factors identifies seven main ‘User Types’ that are again compared across class and age. The paper finds that class and age act relatively independently as predicators of digital media use and neither compound nor mitigate each other's effects. Importantly the paper notes that the greatest levels and breadth of Internet use can be found in NRS social class groups AB and to an extent C1. In contrast the greatest levels of non-use and limited use can be found in NRS social class groups DE. In conclusion the paper notes that age still acts as the major explanatory variable for overall use and some specific types of use, but that class also independently acts to explain patterns of digital media use. As a result any simplistic policy expectations that digital access and use issues will become less relevant as age demographics change have to be questioned.

Background: This paper explores the relationship between social class and social media use, and draws upon the work of Bourdieu examining class in terms of social, economic and cultural capital. The paper starts from a prior finding that those who predominantly only use social media formed a higher proportion of internet users from lower socioeconomic groups. Data: Drawing on data from two nationally representative UK surveys the paper makes use of the Ofcom Media Literacy survey (n ≈ 1800 per annum) and the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Taking Part survey (n ≈ 10,000 per annum). Methods: Following Yates, et al. (2015a), five types of internet behaviour and eight types of internet user are identified utilising a principal components analysis and k-means clustering. These internet user types are then examined against measures of social, economic and cultural capital. Data on forms of cultural consumption and digital media use are examined using multiple correspondence analysis. Findings: The paper concludes that forms of digital media use are in correspondence with other social, cultural and economic aspects of social class status and contemporary social systems of distinction.

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study exploring the technologically-mediated practices of work/life balancing, blurring and boundary-setting of a cohort of professionals in knowledge-intensive roles in Sheffield, a regional city in Northern England. It contributes to a growing body of CSCW research on the complex interweaving of work and non-work tasks, demands and on the boundaries that can be supported or hindered by digital technologies. In the paper, we detail how a cohort of 26 professionals in knowledge-intensive roles devise diverse strategies for handling work and non-work in light of a set of interconnected forces, and we argue that boundary dissolving and work-life blurring, and not just boundary setting and Bbalancing^, are essential resources within such strategies. We also show how boundary sculpting pertains not only to work pervading personal spheres of life, but also the opposite, and that establishing, softening and dissolving boundaries are practiced to handle situations when the personal seeps into professional life.