This work finds its place within Participatory Design (PD) as a specific approach to co-design that focuses on the politics of technological innovation and sociotechnical transformations. In particular, the article contributes to the repositioning of co-design in the age of platform capitalism by engaging with the question: how can participatory designers approach interventions for the long-term sustainability of platforms as commons? As the contradictions and limitations of platform capitalism become increasingly evident, to engage with such a challenge is a way to pursue PD's renewed political agenda. The article foregrounds the concept of platforms as commons to bring designers' attention towards those platform arrangements which are antithetical to platform capitalism exploitative ones. By building on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), as a paradigmatic case of platform as commons, the article outlines participation, infrastructure, and governance as relevant perspectives for framing broad areas of sustainability concerns; and it articulates them along four approaches for supporting long-term sustainability in practice: maintaining, scaling, replicating, and evolving.Ultimately, this article provides participatory designers with a map of possible orientations to frame and support their work, research or interventions around the long-term sustainability of platforms as commons.
Thanks to renewable energies the decentralized energy system model is becoming more relevant in the production and distribution of energy. The scenario is important in order to achieve a successful energy transition. This paper presents a reflection on the ongoing experience of infrastructuring a sociotechnical system in which local communities can manage renewable energies as a Common Pool Resources. We explore how to create a space for citizens' participation in a continuous process of design for energy management. Objectives of the paper are: i) to clarify how Participatory Design could support the sustainability and the effectiveness of an alternative, ii) to present an experimentation with renewable energy as CPR as an alternative model to the actual vision of the energy system. Preliminary results reported in this paper suggest that a Participatory Design process can be valuable for communities in order to establish new energy management models.
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In traditional engineering, technologies are viewed as the core of the engineering design, in a physical world with a large number of diverse technological artefacts. The real world, however, also includes a huge number of social components -people, communities, institutions, regulations and everything that exists in the human mind -that have shaped and been shaped by the technological components. Smart urban ecosystems are examples of large-scale Socio-Technical Systems (STS) that rely on technologies, in particular on the Internet-of-Things (IoT), within a complex social context where the technologies are embedded. Designing applications that embed both social complexity and IoT in large-scale STS requires a Socio-Technical (ST) approach, which has not yet entered the mainstream of design practice. This chapter reviews the literature and presents our experience of adopting an ST approach to the design of a community-oriented smart grid application. It discusses the challenges, process and outcomes of this apporach, and provides a set of lessons learned derived from this experience that are also deemed relevant to the design of other smart urban ecosystems.
Collaboratively written by thousands of people, Wikipedia produces entries which are consistent with criteria agreed by Wikipedians and of high quality. This article focuses on Wikipedia’s Featured Articles and shows that not every contribution can be considered as being of equal quality. Two groups of articles are analysed by focusing on the edits distribution and the main editors’ contribution. The research shows how these aspects of the revision patterns can change dependent upon the category to which the articles belong.
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