From MediaFranca

Contents 1 People v/s the System:Finding Design Pathways for Participation and Social Change 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Part I: What the designer must first understand about the potential social power of digital media 1.2.1 Power 1.3 Part II: Integrative and ethical norms the designer must enforce for New Media to reach its potential as a positive social force 1.3.1 Integrating the environment 1.3.2 Trust and credibility 1.3.3 Ethical Imperatives 1.4 Conclusions

People v/s the System:
Finding Design Pathways for Participation and Social Change

Introduction

At a steady rate, digital media is offering new forms of participation, collaboration, social relationships and the widespread dissemination of knowledge. In the near future, network computing will be fully mobile and embedded ; it will be everywhere, and its ubiquity will reduce all distance between users and their computing environments. Nonetheless, we must distinguish enhanced connectivity and an enhanced collectivity. Merely because digital media is making people more connected does not mean it is increasing the degree of their social coordination. Quite the opposite, according to (put your citation here), you people seem to feel more individualist and apathetic about their environment. For example, young people nowadays feel less inclined than their elders to engage as citizens in the rituals of voting and following news about world events and public affairs . Furthermore, compared to their elders, you people today are thought to feel a powerlessness that erodes their interest in democracy (put your citation here) Can design help reverse these trends? Can it help transform increased connectivity into increased socialization, civic participation, and a greater sense of individual and collective agency? These are the questions I pursue in this paper. To anticipate my argument, I will answer that design CAN perform these transformative functions on the majority users of digital media today. However, to do so, the design community must itself have it consciousness raised about two significant aspects of digital media. First, as I argue in Part I, designers must fully understand the potential social power already embedded in new forms of digital media. Second, as I argue in Part II, designers must understand the integrative and ethical norms that must be applied if new media is to reach its full potential as a positive social force.

Part I: What the designer must first understand about the potential social power of digital media

Power

• The “bottom-up model”: How new media improves the democratic process by removing ossified political structures, cutting out the middle man, and rejuvenating the architecture of participation. Where, in other words, are the lobbyists, the biased judges, the power-hungry politicians? Here I will address current problems with examples.
• Power of sight
• Visualization and Knowledge representations (the design commitment for transparency and neutrality)
• The case of google earth (why represent? explicit representations and models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to use the world as its own model.
• Power of word
• Collaborative graph grammars
• Shifting the paradigm of the digital document and creating knowledge representations. What happens when the machine is part of the audience. Here I’m going to talk about the affordances and possibilities of the semantic web.
• Power of action
•  ????? examples needed. (NGOs ?)

Part II: Integrative and ethical norms the designer must enforce for New Media to reach its potential as a positive social force

Integrating the environment

• Autopoiesis and system thinking
  • Present a short a simple definition of this concept and why it’s important while designing social interactions or interactions within organizations.
• The idea of flow and coupling
• The emotional root of language and conversations; how culture is rooted in our consensual emotioning.

Trust and credibility

• Judging veracity from the sources
  • What skills are needed (or tools?)
• The voice of the community as the coin of credibility
  • Self-regulating sites. The example of Wikipedia where the locus of knowledge ownership is moving to communities of users.
• Institutional or corporate entities as arbitrers

Role of the Designer

• The designer as the creator of boundary objects
• The designer as a seeder
• The designer as a mediator and integrator

Ethical Imperatives

• The commitment to accessibility, not only in the distribution of information but in the creation of autonomous activities that lead to consent, allowing the construction of their own reality. They shouldn’t be concentrated in broadcasting content but in allowing the production of new one, and also affording its emergence.
• How the tools designed for creativity also shape the possible results. Think also about the dark scenarios, how people can “game” the system and influence and to some extent, control other’s perceptions.

Conclusions

I don’t have anything here yet, I’m just thinking of how to give an answer to this quote:

We live a culture centered in domination and submission, mistrust and control, dishonesty, commerce and greediness, appropriation and mutual manipulation ... and unless our emotioning changes all that will change in our lives will be the way in which we continue in wars, greediness, mistrust, dishonesty, and abuse of others and of nature. Indeed, we shall remain the same. Technology is not the solution for human problems because human problems belong to the emotional domain as they are conflicts in our relational living that arise when we have desires that lead to contradictory actions.