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This chapter addresses the environmental crisis by empowering voices and actions of non-human lifeforms in more-than-human design. This work is significant because dominant approaches to sustainability remain limited by the knowledge of human experts, resulting in exclusion, bias, and inadequate outcomes. Seeking to address this gap, the chapter extends existing theoretical work on more-than-human communities by providing conceptual framing, tools, and examples that can inform design action. To do this, it examines a degraded site that already attracts substantial restoration efforts and contributes to them by designing artificial structures that can support arboreal wildlife. The described workflow scans trees that serve as habitat structures, uses field observations in combination with artificial intelligence to predict bird behaviours, and deploys computation to generate innovative designs. This process reframes trees as designers, birds as clients, and humans as assistants. The evidence contributes to knowledge by demonstrating the potential and practicality of more-than-human participation.

This workshop reflects on the role of participatory design and its community of facilitators and participants in addressing sustainable development in cities, regional centres and rural communities. The workshop will bring together academics, researchers and practitioners to share their experiences, expertise and visions for: (1) evolving participatory design approaches to move beyond the individual; (2) reinvigorating a stronger relationship between communities and institutions across different scales in order to re-politicise participatory design practices, projects and methods; and (3) making a concerted effort of contributing to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We are specifically interested in ways of 'designing smart' by engaging and working with communities to address complex challenges, such as social inequality, economic disparity and environmental degradation to build more sustainable, resilient and socially 'just' communities.

In the digital era of big data, data analytics and smart cities, a new generation of planning support systems is emerging. The Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer is a novel planning support system developed to help planners and policy-makers determine the likely land value uplift associated with the provision of new city infrastructure. The Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer toolkit was developed following a user-centred research approach including iterative design, prototyping and evaluation. Tool development was informed by user inputs obtained through a series of co-design workshops with two end-user groups: land valuers and urban planners. The paper outlines the underlying technical architecture of the toolkit, which has the ability to perform rapid calculations and visualise the results, for the end-users, through an online mapping interface. The toolkit incorporates an ensemble of hedonic pricing models to calculate and visualise value uplift and so enable the user to explore what if? scenarios. The toolkit has been validated through an iterative case study approach. Use cases were related to two policy areas: property and land valuation processes (for land taxation purposes) and value uplift scenarios (for value capture purposes). The cases tested were in Western Sydney, Australia. The paper reports on the results of the ordinary least square linear regressions – used to explore the impacts of hedonic attributes on property value at the global level – and geographically weighted regressions – developed to provide local estimates and explore the varying spatial relationships between attributes and house price across the study area. Building upon the hedonic modelling, the paper also reports the value uplift functionality of the Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer toolkit that enables users to drag and drop new train stations and rapidly calculate expected property prices under a range of future transport scenarios. The Rapid Ana

This chapter reports on a social living lab project that sought to foster digital participation in a regional community. Going beyond the conventional focus on digital literacy, the study explores a participatory action research (PAR) initiative led by the local community to create and operate a community space called ‘Mixhaus’ set up in a disused shipping container. The aim was to create a mobile hack/maker space to allow for the experimental exploration of physical and digital materials. The chapter uses the notion of ‘boundary objects’ as a conceptual framework for our data analysis. The findings reveal challenges and opportunities that community members experienced through their participation in the Mixhaus initiative. On a conceptual level, the findings reveal how Mixhaus became a well-received and concrete example of translating abstract policy imperatives around regional innovation through science and technology. It also demonstrated both context and process for dissolving community boundaries. This continuing PAR project supports participatory responses to socio-economic decline within a particular regional community. More broadly, it addresses regional urbanisation and some of the challenges it triggers, such as youth and general unemployment, brain drain, as well as training and reskilling requirements.

Making visible the places, nature and type of digital learning, and how learning is embodied across everyday activities and places, can help identify opportunities for enhancing digital participation, learning, literacy and inclusion. This chapter presents and discusses the results of a study in Townsville, Australia, that asked participants of a creative technical college, maker/hacker space and innovation network to map out their (physical and virtual) learning environments, which were then used to map a connected learning ecology of digital learning and participation in Townsville. We discuss how links between people, places of learning and different digital interests could be fostered to enhance the digital capacity of the community. Enhancing digital learning and inclusion can help promote community wellbeing in regional areas of Australia such as Townsville, which face a challenging economic future.

Increasingly governments at all levels are becoming more transparent and accessible through their websites and portals, which provide citizens and residents with information and avenues for participation and collaboration. This chapter examines two local government websites in regional Victoria and Queensland (Australia) to understand how the rhetorical functions of these sites support or limit digital participation of their communities in the governance process. The discussion is framed within an understanding of ‘extraurbia’ as spaces that are symptoms of rapid population growth and changing social, economic, and technological conditions.

This chapter provides insights into a social living lab that aimed to foster digital participation in a rural Australian community in south east Queensland, Australia. Research (Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010) illustrates the importance of digital participation initiatives for social participation and social mobility, particularly for individuals who may be identified as being 'at risk' of non-participation. The Pittsworth Stories social living lab was co-designed by university researchers, local residents and a digital media facilitator to assist older residents to engage with digital technologies through interest driven participation. This chapter provides an overview of the implementation of the social living lab and the benefits it provided for local residents.

This chapter explores how social living labs can be used to foster digital participation through harnessing the principles of co-investigation with citizens to solve problems and to take advantage of opportunities with digital technologies. It also considers the importance of digital engagement for social inclusion, well being, economic prosperity and social cohesion. The chapter considers the complexity of overcoming the barriers to digital participation and some of ways digital participation might be facilitated in news ways. The move from living labs to social living labs as a research methodology is presented as a robust set of practices that create ‘spaces of encounter’ to enable opportunities for valuing local knowledge and enhancing citizen’s participation in research. It suggests communities are best placed to foster digital inclusion when they create digital learning ecologies promoting connected learning opportunities across physical and virtual spaces that harness the expertise of a broad range of people for the widest possible range of citizens.

This chapter outlines a social living lab initiative led by the Fostering Digital Participation (FDP) project that aimed to encourage digital participation among a particular group of community members in the regional centre of Toowoomba (Queensland, Australia). Fostering digital participation through a social living lab model and methodology that uses social inclusion and digital connectivity differentiates this project from established living labs approaches that are typically designed more for industrial or commercial applications. Drawing on interview and observational data, the chapter discusses the processes and outcomes of a digital storytelling social living lab. The chapter provides a detailed outline of how the living lab was conducted and includes an analysis of the work produced by the young people involved in the social living lab. It also offers reflections on why the social living lab was a success, as well as the difficulties, challenges and insights for future practice.

This chapter describes a social living lab with volunteer language tutors and adult migrants in a regional town in Queensland, Australia. The aim of the lab was to build the language teaching capacity and digital skills of the tutors as a foundation for teaching English to the migrants who had settled with their families in the area. The social living lab enabled ‘a space of encounter’ that prioritised participant co-construction and afforded attention to both research and the community needs (Franz, 2015). In Australia, migration and settlement are increasingly impacting regional and rural communities as skilled migrants provide much-needed labour in abattoirs and other workplaces. In this particular town, many of the migrants were Brazilian on a temporary skilled visa, known as the 457 visa. The Brazilian women were supported in their English learning by the government-funded Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP) based at the local Technical and Further Education (TAFE) college. Because of the women’s work and family commitments, the language teaching was largely delivered through a home tutoring program conducted by the volunteers, many of whom were retired, community-orientated women from the local town. The chapter highlights the processes of building a learning community and fostering digital participation, and provides an example of informal language education in a rural setting undergoing cultural and linguistic change. It also proposes extensions to thinking on social living lab methodology that respond to calls for greater theorisation of practice.

The B4 - Brisbane Backyard Bird Box is a situated, social, and gamified web based application with a dedicated recording box aimed to support wider community engagement in environmental conservation. The B4 prototype will enable urban dwellers to record audio of their environment to learn and identify the bird calls they heard in their backyard. We foresee the B4 project will help to develop connections between people and the environment and, as well as with other people - both within families and the greater community.

Sound allows people to intimately relate to nature.When people search for wildlife they often rely on their expert knowledge to recognise animal calls. The process of learning these calls involves social engagement and repeated identification in situ. Rare, cryptic, and migratory animals, however, are difficult to hear when people are only at a given location for minutes or hours. This makes many species difficult to study on a large scale, further confounded because human presence may disturb individual animals and reduce their likelihood of detection. Acoustic monitoring has great potential to engage people with animal calls. It can reveal hidden subtleties of animal lives over long periods. Here, we explore new ways to engage people with natural sounds. We begin with an exploration of the artefacts and practices of birdwatchers, and then online citizen scientists (voluntary contributors to scientific research). Next, we discuss how these practices can extend to co-design user interfaces for people to listen to calls from the wild and make ecological discoveries.

This paper investigates the challenges of bodily communication during video-based clinical consultations. While previous works describe the lack of eye contact and gestures over video, it is unclear how these limitations impact the course of a clinical consultation, particularly in a domain like physiotherapy where the focus is on improving body movements and functioning. To contribute to this understanding, we conducted observations of 10 naturally occurring video and face-to-face consultations for physiotherapy. We found that clinicians rely on a variety of incidental bodily cues and fine-details of body movements to assess and examine the patient. These bodily cues were noticeable during face-to-face consultations; however, a variety of bodily cues got missed over video. Consequently, video consultations became conversational where the clinicians used verbal conduct to get a fair understanding of the patient's health. To guide design of future video consultation systems, we reflect on our understanding as 4 design sensitivities: Visual Acuity, Field-of-view, Clinical Asymmetries, and Time Sequence.

This paper describes the design of "ArmSleeve", a patient monitoring system to support occupational therapists in their upper limb rehabilitation work with stroke patients. Occupational therapists can provide rehabilitation in clinics, but they have limited insights into how much their patients use their affected arm and hand in daily life, which is critical for effective recovery to occur. Our work addresses this problem through three interrelated studies: (1) interviews with therapists to examine their current rehabilitation practices; (2) the design of the "ArmSleeve Sensor" to monitor a patient's upper limb movement; and (3) the design and evaluation of the "ArmSleeve Dashboard" to visualize this information for therapists. The findings show the importance of collecting objective data to assess exercise and activities outside therapy, but also a lack of contextual information to interpret this data. We discuss considerations for how to address this issue through patient engagement as well as considerations for designing wearable sensor technology that is usable in everyday life.

This pictorial is a visual pondering of the potential hidden within the mundane aspects of everyday life. Grounded in the theoretical concepts of ‘design futuring’ and ‘undesign’, it is framed in a speculative context and seeks to propose avenues for thought within the design space. This paper is not a reflection of a design process, nor is it presenting new and novel concept designs. Instead, this paper combines visuals and literature to encourage the reader into a mode of theoretical and personal reflection on the open possibilities for the future of design - through the reimagining of the mundane.

The web has become the primary mechanism for information delivery. However, for people with an intellectual disability there can be significant barriers in accessing the web. This research aims to design a novel solution to help people with a disability, especially people who cannot type easily or correctly, to access the web independently. We propose to utilize Near Field Communication tokens to store and materialize website addresses into tangible handles for web access. Most importantly, we use tokens to store frequently used key words and serve as visual aids to enable query through combination of different search tokens. This solution has the potential to improve the quality of life yet is still relatively simple and affordable. Furthermore, together with other advanced technologies such as 3D printing for personalized tokens, it opens up the opportunities for co-design between people with disability and caregivers, customized services and collaborative support for diverse users via online volunteers.

When refugees and asylum seekers start new lives in a host community, they face many challenges and often rely on others for help. ICT can play a significant role to empower and support them in their new lives. In this paper, we focus on understanding the challenges that refugees and asylum seekers face in order to build a comprehensive perspective to design suitable technologies. As a first step, we carried out a qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with 7 participants: 5 refugees and asylum seekers and 2 activists. Our preliminary findings show that there are three common themes that affect such demography: - (1) Social isolation, - (2) Cultural backdrops, and; - (3) The role of technology. Based on this, we provide some early insights into designing an innovative ICT platform to empower refugees and asylum seekers for their social inclusion in the host society.

People who play video games do so in a range of social contexts: alone, with people they know and don’t know, in cooperative and competitive settings. However, little is known about what people enjoy or dislike about these contexts of play, or how to best design games to support player preferences. Using open-ended responses from an online survey (N = 326) and a series of interviews (N = 16) this study shows that the solitary context offers immersive, relaxing, autonomous play, as well as the avoidance of unwanted social interactions. Social play, however, provides competence-enhancing experiences (via competition or teamwork or both) via interactions with others. What was disliked about these contexts indicates where design improvements to both the solitary and social play experiences can be made.

The sounds of animals leave remarkable traces of information about their habitat. Ecologists use environmental sound as a proxy to monitor the environment. This has led to the collection of massive sound archives, posing a big data problem of how to investigate it all. Visualization can transform aural information into visual representations summarizing huge datasets, revealing patterns, trends, and relationships in the data. New techniques in interactive visual analysis will enable ecologists to explore and mine for insights about animals and the environment. We envision a synergistic design cycle of discovery and refinement between the user and the system. However, this gives rise to a unique set of design challenges in crafting interactive visual analytic techniques that can cater for large, highly contextual and complex environmental acoustics. This paper presents the key characteristics of big environmental sound data and identifies challenges in designing visual analytics for ecological investigations.

Smart everyday objects could support the wellbeing, independent living and social connectedness of ageing people, but their successful adoption depends upon them fitting with their skills, values and goals. Many technologies fail in this respect. Our work is aimed at designs that engage older people by building on their individual affective attachment to habituated objects and leveraging, from a participatory design perspective, the creative process through which people continuously adapt their homes and tools to their own lifestyle. We contribute a novel analytic framework based on an analysis of related research on appropriation and habituated objects. It identifies steps in appropriation from inspection to performance and habituation. We test this framework with the preliminary testing of an augmented habituated object, a messaging kettle. While only used in one home so far, its daily use has provoked many thoughts, scenarios and projections about use by friends, both practical, utopian and dystopian.

Large digital screens are becoming prevalent across today’s cities dispersing into everyday urban spaces such as public squares and cultural precincts. Examples, such as Federation Square, demonstrate the opportunities for using digital screens to create a sense of place and to add long-term social, cultural and economic value for citizens, who live and work in those precincts. However, the challenge of implementing digital screens in new urban developments is to ensure they respond appropriately to the physical and sociocultural environment in which they are placed. Considering the increasing rate at which digital screens are being embedded into public spaces, it is surprising that the programs running on these screens still seem to be stuck in the cinematic model. The availability of advanced networking and interaction technologies offers opportunities for information access that goes beyond free-to-air television and advertising. This chapter revisits the history and current state of digital screens in urban life and discusses a series of research studies that involve digital screens as interface between citizens and the city. Instead of focusing on technological concerns, the chapter presents a holistic analysis of these studies, with the aim to move towards a more comprehensive understanding of the sociocultural potential of this new media platform, and how the digital content is linked with the spatial quality of the physical space, as well as the place and role of digital screens within the smart city movement.

Urban agriculture is practiced in many forms within urban spaces, ranging from large organised community gardens to individuals with a backyard or balcony. We present the synthesis of findings from three studies exploring different types of urban agriculture: city farms, residential gardeners, and a grassroots group that supports local communities. Where the findings of individual studies are used to justify a design approach, there are often difficulties encountered because of different context of the original study. Through our understanding and synthesis of multiple studies, we propose a set of design patterns. The proposed patterns can be utilised concurrently depending on the scale and context of both the physical garden, and community. The relationships between the patterns and their concurrent use are discussed, and the resulting links provided the foundation for a pattern language. The eight initial patterns provide a foundation on which we would encourage other researchers to contribute, in order to develop a pattern language to holistically consider urban agriculture beyond the scope of our experiences in Brisbane, and to enrich the patterns with a variety of gardening practices.

During everyday urban life, people spend time in public urban places waiting for specific events to occur. During these times, people sometimes tend to engage with their information and communication technology (ICT) devices in a way that shuts off interactions with collocated people. These devices could also be used to better connect with the urban space and collocated people within. This chapter presents and discusses the impact of three design interventions on the urban user experience enabling collocated people to share lightweight, non-privacy-sensitive data in the urban space. We investigate and discuss the impact on the urban experience under the notions of people, place, and technology with an emphasis on how the sharing of non-privacy-sensitive data can positively transform anonymous public urban places in various ways through anonymous digital augmentations.

Our contemporary concerns about food range from food security to agricultural sustainability to getting dinner on the table for family and friends. This book investigates food issues as they intersect with participatory Internet culture--blogs, wikis, online photo- and video-sharing platforms, and social networks in efforts to bring about a healthy, socially inclusive, and sustainable food future. Focusing on our urban environments provisioned with digital and network capacities, and drawing on such "bottom-up" sociotechnical trends as DIY and open source, the chapters describe engagements with food and technology that engender (re-)creative interactions.

This position paper describes the work in progress towards the goal of building a technical prototype that enables users – those who have little or no knowledge and experience engaging in urban agriculture – to receive information personalised to their location and situation, and allow them to ask questions and share experiences with others. We describe the design process thus far, informed by a survey and a workshop with experts in the field, before concluding with the future direction of this work.

Most urban agriculture literature focus on addressing access to healthy and affordable food and environmental issues via managing the urban farming chain which consists of production, processing, marketing, distribution and consumption. This paper focuses on a less acknowledged and documented aspect of individual urban farming: growing and sharing garden produce for recreation, well-being and friend making. This paper summarizes the experience of individual backyard farming and sharing as a way to interact with nature and people and explores ways to improve this experience, especially with the assistance of Information Communication Technology.

In this chapter we take a high-level view of social media, focusing not on specific applications, domains, websites, or technologies, but instead our interest is in the forms of engagement that social media engender. This is not to suggest that all social media are the same, or even that everyone’s experience with any particular medium or technology is the same. However, we argue common issues arise that characterize social media in a broad sense, and provide a different analytic perspective than we would gain from looking at particular systems or applications. We do not take the perspective that social life merely happens “within” such systems, nor that social life “shapes” such systems, but rather these systems provide a site for the production of social and cultural reality – that media are always already social and the engagement with, in, and through media of all sorts is a thoroughly social phenomenon. Accordingly, in this chapter, we examine two phenomena concurrently: social life seen through the lens of social media, and social media seen through the lens of social life. In particular, we want to understand the ways that a set of broad phenomena concerning forms of participation in social life is articulated in the domain of social media. As a conceptual entry-point, we use the notion of the “moral economy” as a means to open up the domain of inquiry. We first discuss the notion of the “moral economy” as it has been used by a number of social theorists, and then identify a particular set of conceptual concerns that we suggest link it to the phenomena of social networking in general. We then discuss a series of examples drawn from a range of studies to elaborate and ground this conceptual framework in empirical data. This leads us to a broader consideration of audiences and publics in social media that, we suggest, holds important lessons for how we treat social media analytically.

This chapter reports on research work that aims to overcome some limitations of conventional community engagement for urban planning. Adaptive and human-centred design approaches that are well established in human-computer interaction (such as personas and design scenarios) as well as creative writing and dramatic character development methods (such as the Stanislavsky System and the Meisner Technique) are yet largely unexplored in the rather conservative and long-term design context of urban planning. Based on these approaches, we have been trialling a set of performance based workshop activities to gain insights into participants’ desires and requirements that may inform the future design of apartments and apartment buildings in inner city Brisbane. The focus of these workshops is to analyse the behaviour and lifestyle of apartment dwellers and generate residential personas that become boundary objects in the cross-disciplinary discussions of urban design and planning teams. Dramatisation and embodied interaction of use cases form part of the strategies we employed to engage participants and elicit community feedback.

Our paper, “HCI & Sustainable Food Culture: A Design Framework for Engagement,” presented at the 2010 NordiCHI conference, introduced a design framework for understanding engagement between people and sustainable food cultures (Choi and Blevis, 2010). Our goal for this chapter “Advancing Design for Sustainable Food Cultures” is to expand our notion of this design framework and the programme of research it implies. This chapter presents the three elements of design framework for sustainability: (i) engagement across disciplines; (ii) engagement with and amongst users/non-users and; (iii) engagement for sustained usability. The uses a corresponding sample of photographic records of experiences that reflect three key issues in the current sustainable food domain: respectively, (i) context of food cultures, (ii) farmers’ markets, and (iii) producing food.

This paper explores how we may design located information and communication technologies (ICTs) to foster community sentiment. It focuses explicitly on possibilities for ICTs to create new modalities of place through exploring key factors such as shared experiences, shared knowledge and shared authorship. To contextualise this discussion in a real world setting, this paper presents FIGMENTUM, a situated generative art application that was developed for and installed in a new urban development. FIGMENTUM is a non-authoritative, non-service based application that aims to trigger emotional and representational place-based communities. Out of this practice-led research comes a theory and a process for designing creative place-based ICT’s to animate our urban communities.

Early 21st century societies are evolving into a hybrid of real and synthetic worlds where everyday activities are mediated by technology. The result is a new generation of users extending their everyday experiences into these emerging digital ecologies. However, what happens when users re-create their human identity in these spaces? How do the tools of new technologies such as the mobile phone allow them to capture and share their experiences? In order to address these issues this chapter presents the findings from a three-year study into mobile phone use in urban culture. The study revealed that for a new generation the mobile was integral in the formation of fluid social interactions and had accelerated urban mobility. Users once restrained by pre-made plans were able to spontaneously traverse the city and suburbs, swarming between friendship groups and activities. Distinct user archetypes were emerging from these mobile phone driven sub-cultures whose practices were bringing about fundamental changes in social mores with respect to engagement and commitment, to notions of fluid time versus fixed time and ultimately to urban mobility. Connectivity had become central to what it means to have a social identity and users were responding to this by merging bits of data to create their 'ideal digital self' through which they communicate socially. Yet, recent developments in mobile phone design reveal the potential for a new generation of people to recontextualize their use in a way that moves beyond 'the social', as they utilise sensors and data capturing and sharing functionalities in new mobile devices to augment their 'social butterfly' identity with an ideology of a 'socially conscious urban citizen'.

This chapter defines, explores and exemplifies research at the intersection of people, place and technology in cities. First we theorise the notion of ecology in the social production of space to continue our response to the quest of making sense of an environment characterised by different stakeholders and actors as well as technical, social and discursive elements that operate across dynamic time and space constraints. Second we describe and rationalise our research approach which is designed to illuminate from three different perspectives the processes at play in the social production of space. We illustrate the application of our model in a discussion of a case study of community networking and community engagement in an Australian urban renewal site. Three specific interventions that are loosely positioned at the exchange of each perspective are then discussed in detail, namely: Sharing Stories; Social Patchwork and History Lines; and City Flocks.