Workshop "Participatory & socially responsible technology design" at Mensch und Computer 2020
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Call for Participation 2020 - Participatory & socially responsible technology design
In the workshop, researchers and practitioners will meet to exchange ideas and discuss the participation of users in technology development processes. They will explore the question of how participation can meet the demand for democratization and empowerment in research and practice. This year's workshop will focus in particular on the extent to which self-learning, AI-based systems can be designed in a participatory manner. At the request of the participants, position papers will be published in the workshop proceedings of the conference.
Workshop details
- Submission of a short position paper by June 19, 2020
- Participants upload their position papers via the MuC 2020 conference tool
Participatory technology development assumes that direct cooperation between those who develop technology and those who use it leads to technical solutions that meet the needs of users. Participatory design (PD) of the Scandinavian school explicitly advocates the participation of marginalized population and user groups in technology development processes. The approach goes back to the "Cooperative System Design" of the 1970s, which pursued the political claim of workplace democratization, which was primarily promoted by trade unions, and was to be achieved by involving employees in technology development.
However, what is behind the term participation and how it is handled can vary greatly from project to project. Pelle Ehn, a pioneer in the field of participatory design of the Scandinavian school, and Richard Badham criticized as early as 2002 that the practice of participatory technology development had lost its political claim to democratization and empowerment of the respective user group and thus ultimately to social justice. PD has become a "soft technocracy of user involvement", which is primarily applied in academic technology development areas and less in companies. Current studies of participatory technology development projects support this thesis.
In addition, the question arises as to how participation can be enabled in light of new socio-technical developments in areas such as artificial intelligence, automated driving, digital transformation, the Internet of Things and the associated changes to infrastructures, power relations and precarization.
Based on these challenges, together with participants from different technical contexts and disciplines, we would like to explore the potentials and limits of participatory design with regard to socially responsible technology development. We will discuss the question: To what extent does user participation lead to socially responsible technology development? And how can this be applied to self-learning, artificial intelligence and big data-based systems?
Based on our experiences and those of the participants, we would like to take an unvarnished look at the processes, approaches, participation and influence relationships of participatory technology development projects and discuss them on the basis of requirements such as democratic participation of all participants, equal inclusion of marginalized user and population groups, mutual learning experiences, critical reflections and controversial-constructive negotiation processes. The aim is to jointly collect criteria and define framework conditions that must be met in order for user participation to lead to socially responsible and inclusive technology.
Researchers and practitioners are invited to reflect on their experiences with user participation in technology development based on the following questions:
- What were the participation structure and interests of the project?
- What criteria were used to select users? Were gender and diversity aspects taken into account?
- What did the research and development process look like? Who was involved in which research and decision-making processes? How much influence or decision-making power did the users have?
- What methods were used? How did they influence, enable or prevent participation and influence?
- How are the process and project evaluated with regard to the requirements of participatory design and ultimately with regard to their contribution to socially responsible technology?
Until June 19, 2020: Submission of short contributions
Please create a short position paper in the format of your choice (e.g. pictorial, video, animation, abstract of 1-2 pages) using the format for MuC contributions or other formats. Submit the contributions via the ConfTool by the above-mentioned deadline. Papers whose formats cannot be submitted via the conference tool can be sent to the workshop organizers (Siege emails below). When submitting, please let us know whether you wish to publish your short paper (MuC workshop volume with ISBN).
By July 01, 2020: Notification of acceptance and feedback on the contributions
The workshop organizers will review and select the contributions and provide feedback to the participants.
By July 10, 2020: Submission of the revised, final contributions
After submission of the final contributions via the conference tool (please note!!!), a detailed program for the workshop will be prepared and announced, for which the authors will be asked to prepare short presentations. In addition to discussing the contributions, we will address the challenges of participatory, socially responsible technology design of and with AI-based systems and plan the next steps for the newly founded specialist group "Participation" in the Human-Computer Interaction (MCI) section of the German Informatics Society (GI).