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11
Infrastructuring Participatory Development
in Information Technology
Antonella De Angeli, Silvia Bordin, María Menéndez Blanco
University of Trento, Via Sommarive 9, 38123 Trento, Italy
deangeli@disi.unitn.it, bordin@disi.unitn.it, menendez@disi.unitn.it
ABSTRACT
In this paper we present our experience in building a
socio-technical infrastructure for supporting social
innovation in Information Technology. We start by
describing a case study on the design and use of a
smartphone application for the canteen services of a local
university; based on this, we propose what we call the
hourglass approach to support participatory design and
development in Information Technology. The hourglass
is defined by the intersection of two co-evolving
dimensions of infrastructuring: the social and the
technical ones. Different subsets of the community,
characterized by the increasing involvement of self-
selected volunteers, position themselves along the two
axes and have different roles in the design and use of the
generated artefact. We conclude by discussing how this
approach can help addressing some of the current
challenges (i.e. scale, milieu and responsibilities) of
social innovation in Information Technology.
Author Keywords
Participatory design; social innovation; infrastructuring.
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,
HCI): Miscellaneous.
INTRODUCTION
Social innovation has been designated as one of the main
goals in Horizon 2020, the EU Framework Programme
for research and innovation (Barroso, 2011). For the EU,
social innovation is about “meeting the unmet social
needs and improving social outcomes” as well as
“empowering citizens to become co-creators of
innovative social relationships and models of
collaboration.” This voice is echoed in different
communities of practice and research (Chesbrough, 2003;
Björgvinsson et al., 2010; Fischer et al., 2004) which,
while sharing an awareness that citizens are fundamental
actors in the innovation process, have a different
understanding of the general assembly in which the
innovation is to happen or, in Latour’s (2004) terms,
identify different “matters of concern”.
The large base of expertise developed within the field of
Participatory Design (PD) over the past 20 years (Ehn,
1998; Bødker et al., 2000) provides a distinctive
perspective on leveraging the move towards social
innovation. However, this perspective does not easily
scale from work environments to public spheres
(Dalsgaard, 2010); it is largely sensitive to the cultural
diversity of the innovation milieu (Björgvinsson et al.,
2010); and it opens a number of important ethical issues
related to unsatisfied expectations of participants who
devote their time to the project (Bossen et al., 2012).
Social innovation in public spheres requires extensive
amount of infrastructuring (Björgvinsson et al., 2010;
Pipek and Wulf, 2009), which we intend as the process of
creating the social and technical conditions for
innovation. This process unfolds in, and needs constant
adaptation to, the specific context where it is developed.
Borrowing the theme of this year’s conference, we
suggest that social innovation “reflects connectedness” in
the double sense of being influenced during design by the
existing culture of participation, and generating new
possibilities for feeling connected to others during use.
In this paper we reflect on the Smart Campus project.
This project started two years ago and has several
concurrent objectives situated within a “Smart City”
framework: first, it aims at empowering the students to
take a more active role in designing the services they
want and like, and to participate in their development,
delivery and evangelization; second, it aims at building a
socio-technical service infrastructure for the local
Province. The University campus was selected as the
playground to experiment with a vision that emphasizes
the role of the community not only as decision-maker, but
also as builder of services.
The Smart Campus project led to the design and
implementation of a mobile app for canteen services of a
local university, called iFame (a play on words, since in
Italian it is pronounced as “hai fame?” which means “are
you hungry?”), by the students; we reflect on this case
study and on how it can be applied in the future. In
particular, we abstract from our experience and propose
an approach addressing two concurrent dimensions of
innovation infrastructuring: the social and technical ones.
While acknowledging the ongoing debate over the
distinction between these terms (e.g. humans versus
nonhumans: Latour, 1999), for the sake of simplicity in
this paper we refer to technical infrastructuring as the
ensemble of computing technologies which support the
use and production of Information Technology services
and to social infrastructuring as the set of human actors
who influence, shape and represent the community.
Together, these two dimensions define an hourglass
structure, which is elaborated further on in the paper. This
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12
structure is meant to create the conditions for the
application of PD in an environment which is favourable
to participation only to a limited extent and involves a
large community of different mobile stakeholders.
The paper is organized as follows. Discussing related
work we identify three main challenges affecting PD in
the public sphere: scale, context and ethical
responsibilities. We then discuss our case study about
iFame, also describing the process that led to its
realization and to the initial establishment of a
community. Finally, we reflect on our experience and
propose an approach about how to put in place the socio-
technical infrastructuring of innovation and foster
citizens’ participation in large-scale public projects, even
in an environment that is not always ready for this.
RELATED WORK
Social innovation, conceived as the development of
products, services and models that meet social needs and
enhance society’s capacity to act (Murray et al., 2010), is
a complex and multifaceted process, which has been
investigated by different scholars, including those
belonging to business, design and computer science areas.
Business and management studies propose the concept of
“open innovation” and “democratizing innovation”,
regarded as a top-down approach where “lead users”
provide innovative ideas (Chesbrough, 2003; Von Hippel,
2005). A few key users are carefully selected by the
management team based on some unique personal
characteristics, often linked to popularity. Conversely,
crowdsourcing can be used as a way to pursue innovation
by profiting from a large number of creative “working-
consumers” (Kleemann et al, 2008). In both approaches,
companies and institutions select and implement the ideas
generated. This approach has been often criticized
because of its narrow interpretation of the democratic
aspect of innovation and a main emphasis on objects and
products (Björgvinsson et al., 2010; Bossen et al., 2012).
The European reading of democratizing innovation was
strongly influenced by PD approaches (Björgvinsson et
al., 2010). This vision emphasizes the role of end-users
not only as sources of innovative designs and
functionalities, but also as active and reflective designers
who are capable of positioning themselves in a real
situation, reflecting on it, and taking decisions based on
their knowledge (Schön, 1983; Kanstrup, 2012). In this
way, democratizing innovation can be seen as an “open
innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and
ideas evolve from bottom-up long-term collaborations
amongst different stakeholders” (Björgvinsson et al.,
2010).
The contribution of computer science in social innovation
originated at the border between software engineering and
HCI and resulted in the paradigm of End-User
Development (EUD) (Fischer et al., 2004; Lieberman et
al., 2006). EUD advocates flexible technical
infrastructures offering a “gentle slope” of programming
complexity, so users can adapt software artefacts to new
and changing needs as they occur in their practice.
Several conceptual frameworks and tools have been
proposed, ranging from the paradigm of meta-design or
tailoring, to visual programming languages and
debugging tools. Although the social implications of
EUD were clearly stated in early work (Lieberman et al.,
2006), most research in the field concentrated on the
building of technical infrastructures and was limited to
usability concerns when dealing with the human actor
(Namoun et al., 2010).
All these streams of research mainly concentrated on
working contexts and may demonstrate considerable
weaknesses when stretched to fit the public sphere
(Dalsgaard, 2010). As outlined below, several issues
emerge in terms of scale, context and ethical
responsibilities, among others.
Scale: from work to public spheres
In the early days of PD, the general scope of what was to
be designed was bounded to workplace contexts in which
projects were commonly framed (Ehn, 1998; Bødker et
al., 2000). These contexts usually had the competences
required to transform envisioned designs into real objects
and services. When moving to the public sphere, the
boundaries of what was to be designed – and by whom –
became blurred. According to (Björgvinsson et al., 2010)
innovation in the public sphere entails “Thinging and
infrastructuring”: referring to Latour’s discourse (Latour,
2004), “Thinging” relates to the evolution from the design
of objects and services (i.e., “things”) to the assembly
around “matters of concern” (i.e. “Things”);
“infrastructuring” relates to the on-going processes of
pursuing democratizing innovation by aligning and
adapting to changing situations.
In the public sphere, these processes bring forward
several challenges. Stakeholders usually belong to large
and heterogeneous groups, which are difficult to manage
and keep informed (Dalsgaard, 2010); in addition,
achieving active participation can be an arduous
endeavour since stakeholders might not recognize the
immediate relevance of their involvement (Dalsgaard,
2010). The development of infrastructures is another
main challenge: it is not uncommon to find PD projects
delivering innovative, feasible and desired designs which
ultimately are not realized partially due to “the gap
between politics and techniques” (Kyng, 2010).
This paper contributes to the literature not only in terms
of scaling up the number of users, but also scaling up
their space for participation. We reflect on a case of
participatory development, which we interpret in the
literal sense as leaving the development to volunteers in
the community. These members have the capability of
embedding the outcome of PD (Things) in objects or
services (things). This approach can lead to sustainability
in the long run. Involving users in the design process is in
fact not enough; users should also “gain in their ability
and willingness to take the role of the animator(s)”
(Clement and Van den Besselaar, 1993). As EUD
approaches still suffer from several conceptual and
usability issues hampering general adoption (Namoun et
al., 2010), we experimented in participatory development
with users who are familiar with technology, but we are
confident that different scenarios will be available in the
comin g years.
13
Context: innovation milieus
Another aspect to be considered is the extent to which the
environment is ready and receptive for a PD initiative.
Even though PD has witnessed worldwide reach (Muller
et al., 1991; Kensing and Blomberg, 1998), reproducing
its success outside Scandinavia might be difficult due to
“significant differences in labour, legislative, and
workplace environments” (Muller et al., 1991). Several
calls have been made for deeper reflection on the role of
the innovation milieu and several researchers
acknowledge the need for adapting techniques and
approaches to the local context (Björgvinsson et al., 2010;
Byrne and Sahay, 2007).
This paper reports a case study in Italy, a country which
is increasingly disengaging from participation in public
matters, as clearly witnessed by the number of voters,
which fell from 94% in 1976 to 75% in 20131. In this
context, a number of design initiatives subsuming active
and democratic participation have been launched
(Manzini, 2007; Jégou and Manzini, 2008): for example,
“Cittadini creativi” aims at helping citizens of a district in
Milan to propose, design, and experiment with local
services; “Vicini vicini” is “a service that promotes social
conviviality of a community by providing people a kit to
organize neighbouring parties” and was initiated by the
Municipality of Rome. However, to the best of our
knowledge, challenges and limitations related to the
Italian innovation milieus have not been thoroughly
articulated in the literature.
Ethical responsibilities: gains versus losses
Innovation in the public sphere especially requires the
definition of responsibilities. Ethical issues about
unfulfilled expectations are often not directly discussed in
the PD literature. In spite of designers’ commitment and
good-will, it is difficult at times to ensure that
participants’ efforts will be rewarded and expectations
created by envisioning desired designs will be fulfilled.
A few studies have identified a potential for personal
improvements for participants in PD projects (Bossen et
al., 2012), such as increased social capital, better
understanding of technology and improved career
opportunities. However, absence of a clear set-up for
collaboration, and different conceptions of technology
have been identified as barriers to ensure users’ gains in
PD processes (Bossen et al., 2012).
Since few PD projects move from a research setting to
full-scale development (Kyng, 2010), the discussion on
the ethical implications of engaging in PD has been
difficult. Yet, it is the designers’ responsibility to ground
their intervention on serious considerations of the
possible consequences for the participants if the project
should not deliver as requested. In the Smart Campus
project we have been fine-tuning our approach over time
in order to maximize gains and minimize possible losses
for involved users.
THE SMART CAMPUS PROJECT
The Smart Campus project started in the context of
establishing a Living Lab (Eriksson et al., 2005) in the
1 http://elezionistorico.interno.it/
Trentino Province. In the short term, the goal of the
project is to create an ecosystem that can foster students’
active participation in Campus matters. In the longer
term, the goal is to act as a sandbox for the development
of infrastructures to foster active participation of citizens
in social innovation (Björgvinsson et al., 2010).
The project has now been running for over two years.
Four main stakeholders participate in it. TrentoRISE (the
innovation catalyst funded by public sources in the local
Province to act as the Italian node of the European
Institute of Technology) is the funding body. The
members of its management board, and most of the
researchers, come from a computer science background,
but they are developing an increased awareness of the
process and the need for social innovation. Some
evidence of this growing interest includes the evolution of
the tagline in the last couple of years from “open
innovation rooted in research and education” to “social
innovation… ” and then to “societal innovation...”;
however, funding distribution has not followed the same
evolution so far. Within this context, the innovation
model proposed by TrentoRISE aims to benefit the local
community in the Trentino Province through results of
computing research and education.
The University of Trento and FBK are core partners of
TrentoRISE. Within the Smart Campus project, they
represent both the beneficiaries and the providers of the
research capability. These two bodies share a history of
alliances and conflicts, and they both perceive
TrentoRISE at times as an ally or as a challenge to their
status. At the beginning of the project, the University
agreed to act as a use case, though its commitment and
interest varied through the years. In particular, despite
supporting the agenda of open innovation, the University
was not yet ready to engage with PD processes when the
project started.
The primary stakeholders are represented by the
University students, the population we aim to engage in
social innovation. Developing and evaluating strategies
for motivating them to play the role of active designers
and developers has been the main challenge the authors
have pursued over the last two years.
Innovation milieu
Trento is a medium-sized city (115,000 inhabitants
approximately), technologically advanced and with a very
high quality of life: it ranked 45 in the 2007 European
Smart Cities Ranking2 and first in the 2013 Italian ICity
Rate3. Moreover, in the last few years the local
administration has started several projects in order to
establish a Living Lab, resulting in the city being selected
among the ten cities worldwide to be included in the
IEEE Smart Cities Initiative4. The city and Province
therefore constitute a receptive environment for
2 http://www.smart-cities.eu/ranking.html
3 http://saperi.forumpa.it/story/73757/icity-rate-2013-la-nuova-
classifica-italiana-delle-citta-intelligenti
4http://international.unitn.it/news/quality-life-trento-among-
worlds-ten-smart-cities
14
innovation; the emphasis of this process is however often
put more on the technological side (i.e., on the
development and testing of new systems) rather than on
the understanding of the social effects caused by such
innovation.
The local University campus represents a medium-sized
community, consisting of ten departments, approximately
16,000 students, 600 academics and as many
administrative staff. The campus is spread across several
districts of the city. The collegiate system is governed by
academic and administrative staff and allows a marginal
level of representation to the students. In the last years,
however, the participation to the university governance of
students has been very moderate. The 2012 election for
representatives at the University Board witnessed a
turnout of less than 20% undergraduate and master
students, and 10% doctoral students.
Innovation approach
The evolution of Smart Campus to date can be divided in
two phases: design and use. The design of the social and
the technical infrastructure unfolded over two years; the
use phase began in November 2013 with the release of
iFame.
The technical and the social infrastructure were designed
in parallel, with several phases of intervention, analysis
and iteration. The technical stream is grounded on open
data and service oriented architectures; the social stream
has experimented with principles and techniques of
interaction and PD. These two streams met in a process of
community building around the design of artefacts. The
social goal is to facilitate student participation in service
design and seed the ground for a larger scale intervention
in the city; the technical goal is to develop a service
platform, a permanent facility to be handed over to the
community of citizens that has been cultivated around the
project. This paper concentrates on design and use of the
social infrastructure; the technical infrastructure is briefly
described in the following section.
Technical infrastructure
For the Smart Campus project, the service platform is a
necessary technical infrastructure for social innovation;
its architecture is represented in Figure 1. The bottom part
represents a set of systems provided by external
institutions or third parties: they correspond to basic
functionalities and available information sources. A
service back-end has the responsibility of wrapping these
systems and ensuring that they can be composed into
more complex processes.
The core of the platform sits on top of the service back-
end: it consists of an environment that supports the
execution of the services delivered to the students. These
services are built by exploiting the back-end services as
well as a set of enabling (i.e., infrastructural) services.
The core of the platform also takes care of collecting the
available services and supporting their discovery and
selection. Finally, the top level of the platform
corresponds to the service front-end, which guarantees a
multi-platform access to the services. The project has
espoused from the beginning an open source philosophy
for the development process. Furthermore, the project
funded 500 smartphones and a generous data plan for the
students who participated in the experience.
Figure 1. The platform architecture.
DESIGN PHASE
To seed a receptive environment for social innovation, we
engaged in a number of design activities that can be
broadly clustered in four phases ordered along a
continuum of increasing participation of selected
volunteers.
Fieldwork
The fieldwork lasted nine months and ended with the
delivery of a set of six initial apps that were developed
within our lab. These apps help students on a variety of
professional (tracking their university achievements;
managing university email), social (creating university-
based groups; getting information about events in the
city), and private tasks (travelling through the city;
keeping a multimedia diary). They were used as
infrastructure probes (Pipek and Wulf, 2009; Dörner et
al., 2008) to give the students an impression of the
platform possibilities and to encourage the establishment
of the Smart Campus community.
During this phase, we adopted a UCD approach,
involving a large number of people through
questionnaires, diaries, interviews and focus groups. This
work was supplemented by online ethnography and
benchmarking studies. We also enrolled two cohorts of
Master students in Computer Science (N = 60) who
worked in groups of 4 on the design of new ideas for
Smart Campus as part of their course-work in HCI and
CSCW: some of these conceptual designs also evolved
into five MSc dissertations.
Reflecting on this rich source of information with our
students, we extracted 63 design dimensions. They
included matters of concern about studying, saving
money, healthcare, transportation, university cafeterias,
and campus life. Combining the different dimensions, we
developed 20 scenarios (e.g., disabled student,
undergraduate student thinking about her thesis, the
foreign Master’s student), enriched by a PACT analysis
(Benyon, Turner and Turner, 2005). These scenarios were
analysed by the Smart Campus team on the basis of their
15
suitability to act as effective infrastructure probes
according to three criteria: their technical feasibility
within the first year of the project, their potential to
engender the emergence of a lively community, and their
relevance to the technological experimentation carried out
by the team. This screening led to the identification of a
set of 20 services which addressed issues related to the
academic, social, and practical life of the students: these
services included video-streaming of lectures and social-
network applications to share experiences and opinions
on courses and teaching staff, apps aimed at helping
students to find new friends in the campus, mobility apps
and services for administrative procedures.
Figure 2. The Smart Campus suite.
The proposal was discussed during a project management
meeting including representatives of all stakeholders but
no students. The University raised several issues
regarding the design of services for supporting study
activities, which were seen as too close to e-learning:
these issues partially derived from the existence of a
standard e-learning platform enforced by the institutions
and often disregarded or criticised by staff and students.
They were exacerbated by a fear of over-empowering
students and of the possibility of anti-social behaviour,
requiring moderation. Publicly disclosing un-moderated
students’ judgments on academic quality is indeed quite a
bold statement, in a country where the use of standardized
questionnaires for teaching evaluation has been enforced
by law only in 19995, and is kept as confidential
information for teaching staff. These considerations led to
the collective agreement of postponing the development
of services addressing study activities to the second year
of the project, and to the selection of the six initial apps.
5 Italian Law 370/99: “Regulations about universities and
scientific and technological research”,
http://www.miur.it/0006Menu_C/0012Docume/0098Normat/15
68Dispos.htm
In parallel with the selection of the services, we defined
the project visual style following the pattern of ‘flat
design’. We favoured strong colours and simple icons
based on the “toolbox” metaphor. Smart Campus was
conceived as the box containing an increasing set of tools
in the form of service apps. Each app was graphically
associated to a tool and a colour. The interface design
followed an agile usability-based approach, which often
struggled to keep up with development. Figure 2 presents
the Smart Campus launcher as it appears at the beginning
of February 2014: it contains the initial apps and iFame.
StudyMate is currently under development in the lab by
students.
Seeding the community
The apps were released to the students attending the HCI
class in October 2012 at the department of Information
Engineering and Computer Science (N = 90). In this way,
our original base of users was introduced to the Smart
Campus project as a real-world context of application of
the methodologies and techniques taught in class;
furthermore, they could not only provide feedback on
existing artefacts, but also generate, design, and code new
services for their own needs. During this period, we
incorporated UCD and PD practices into the academic
career of these students; after providing them with such
needed knowledge, we also provided them with
smartphones to evaluate the Smart Campus apps. We
believe that seeding PD practices in the community is
important to ensure the sustainability of both the project
and of its underlying vision of technology as a facility for
community empowerment.
Several communication channels were set up to decrease
the gap between designers, developers, and users (Pipek
and Wulf, 2009). These channels ranged from forum and
social networks to personal diaries, face-to-face meetings,
and questionnaires. In the forum students can propose
new ideas, report issues, or participate in thematic
discussions regarding each of the developed apps. As of
February 15th, 2014, it has 455 members, of whom 128
have written at least one post. In total, active members
have contributed 1972 posts.
Over the months, we have started expanding our core
community to other departments: currently, 406 different
students have been involved as users for Smart Campus.
We believe in fact that a multi-faceted community can
bring an added value both to the project and to its
sustainability, as different competences can contribute to
different extents.
Participatory design
Progressively we have shifted towards a PD approach,
with students being involved in all phases of the project.
The conceptual design of the iFame app started in fall
2012: as a final deliverable for their course-work,
students were invited to design and prototype an app that
could solve a problem they considered relevant within
their daily academic life. Several good quality proposals
were presented: among these, a small number were
selected for participating in an “ideas contest”.
The contest was meant as a chance for students to
showcase their work and for the Smart Campus staff to
16
evaluate new proposals for applications. During this
public event, the most interesting projects were presented;
a committee, composed of researchers and university
staff, selected iFame as the best idea. The app was
designed in response to several concerns: students often
note that the quality of food varies among dishes and
canteens, that at peak hours they are likely to queue for a
long time and that the menu composition (and thus the
cost of their meals) is unclear to them. iFame addresses
these issues in its four sections, which are listed below:
iDeciso illustrates daily and monthly menus plus how a
meal can be composed (first course, second course,
snack…) and how much it will cost;
iFretta (“Are you in a hurry?”) shows a streaming view
offered by webcams located at the different canteens, in
order to allow the user to see how long the queue is in
real time;
iSoldi (“Do you have any money?”) allows checking
the balance of the user’s pre-paid card;
iGradito (“Did you enjoy?”) allows the user to rate and
comment the dishes served at different canteens.
Participatory development
The five students who came up with this proposal were
offered a paid internship in the Smart Campus lab, so that
they could receive technical and organizational support to
refine and actually implement their idea; four of them
accepted. Two of the students chose to focus their work
on the front-end side of the application (refinement of the
prototypes, development of the interface) while the other
two chose to focus on the back-end side (business logic
implementation and integration with the Smart Campus
platform). The internships varied in length from three to
six months depending on the concurrent academic
commitments of each student and evolved into BSc
dissertations.
Figure 3. An example of the evolution of the iFame interface.
While in the lab, the development was mainly done by the
interns, who were supported by the staff: the innovation
milieu in fact helped the students to learn. For example,
Figure 3 shows how the main screen of the app evolved
over time, as the developers refined their ideas with the
help of the graphic designer. The staff also took care of
making agreements with the local university in order to
obtain the required information about the canteens, such
as their opening times, the menus, the prices of each meal
and so forth. This endeavour proved to be far from easy:
the issues were both technical (due to the effort of
providing on-the-spot support to interns, but also of
building resources that could support design and
development on the long run) and organizational (such as
the factual unavailability of claimed open data or the
restrictions posed to social innovation by political
resistance to service quality assessment).
USE PHASE
A first official version of iFame was released to the Smart
Campus community in early November 2013. Some time
later, a moderation activity was introduced so that the lab
could ensure the appropriateness of comments that
students were writing about the canteen dishes. This was
a strong requirement imposed by the University.
We now present the first evidence of the fact that iFame
is starting to generate a community of its own among its
users and that the latter show different degrees of
involvement. All subsequent citations have been
translated from Italian. Furthermore, the data presented
refers to the period going from November 2013 to
February 2014; we are aware of the fact that such a period
has a limited duration, yet we can already see some trends
that we report in the following sections.
Opportunistic use
Once the app was released, it did not fall into a vacuum,
but was rather received by the community we had seeded
in the design phase. Most of the students who chose to
actually use the application did so in order to benefit from
the information it provides, but did not enter any
comments about the food or provide feedback about
iFame in the available communication channels.
Since the release of the app there have been on average
approximately 100 daily server requests (SD = 125.14);
the high standard deviation is due the fact that the usage
decreases steeply during the weekends, winter break and
examination periods. The highest peak happened during
the week of the release (immediately before Christmas
holiday), where we observed 440 server requests in the
same day. The most used functionalities (amounting to
some 70% of the total usage) are checking the length of
the queue, checking the credit balance, reading comments
about food and checking the daily menu.
Content contribution
Some of the iFame users not only benefited from the
information provided by the app, but also actively
populated it with their comments and ratings about the
food served at the different canteens. In four months, 212
reviews have been posted by 61 users, with an average of
3.50 reviews per person (SD = 4.20). Some 60% of them
also contained a comment and not just a rating.
The reviews about the dishes underwent an automated
filtering of offensive language and has then to be
manually approved by a member of the team: however, of
the 127 comments left by users during the period at hand,
only 2 required blocking. Comments usually consist of an
overall judgment of the quality of the dish (“excellent!”,
“very tasty”), or more specific suggestions (“the sauce is
very good, shame about the badly cooked pasta”, “the
sauce is always excellent and you must always ask for
more. Worth it!”).
17
Ratings were left for 130 different plates, with an average
of 1.61 ratings per plate (SD = 1.30). We note that,
apparently, the more positive a person’s opinion is, the
stronger is the tendency to leave a comment rather than
just a rating: this induces us to think that our users tend to
report food they particularly like. Users could also like
and dislike comments: this feature was however seldom
used (24 students only, with an average of 2.01 votes; SD
= 2.46) and always in a positive way.
Reflective contribution
Some users took advantage of the various communication
channels (e.g. survey, diary, forum) available to discuss
their opinions about the app, suggesting improvements
and commenting on the existing functionalities; here we
summarise the main insights.
A survey was run in December 2013 regarding use of
iFame. In total, 201 people answered the questionnaire
(159 M, 42 F). Most of them (40%) claimed using iFame
at least several times a week; some of them used it once a
week (12%) or less than once a week (14%). Some people
claimed to have tried it once (14%) or never (20%). Some
respondents however noted that they never eat at the
University canteens. People were also asked to judge their
experience with iFame on a 6-points Likert scale. People
were moderately positive about the app (mean = 4.0, SD
= 1.44) and would slightly agree to share it with others
(mean = 4.19, SD = 1.59).
We also asked a few open-ended questions about how
they would improve the app. Students seem to be satisfied
with iFame and often expressed positive comments. In
particular, it appears that having students design and
develop apps for their peers is highly appreciated,
although the extent of the participatory development was
not always clear. One person wrote “…as a concept, it is
probably one of the most successful apps in the Smart
Campus set”; another one wrote, “…for what I know, it is
an app created at the request of some students. I would
recommend you to continue on this path because the
result is excellent”.
iFame is mentioned several times in personal diary
entries, mainly by users that were involved at the same
time when the app was released. People mainly comment
on how they use the app: checking the balance on their
canteen card, checking the line at the canteen, viewing the
daily menu. Opinions are mainly positive, describing the
app as useful, easy to use and complete; some users also
provide suggestions for improvement, including the
calculation of the nutritional value of a meal, which we
expect could lead to new design and development.
The forum dedicated to iFame started with one of the
intern students announcing the imminent release of the
app. So far, 21 people have written 80 posts in 16 topics,
which had 2190 views. Four project staff members wrote
17 posts, with an average of 4.25 posts each (SD = 3.77).
Seventeen students posted 61 times, with an average of
3.59 posts each (SD = 4.87). The most active contributor
(21 posts) was one of the intern students who participated
in the development of the application.
We performed an inductive thematic analysis (Braun and
Clarke, 2006) on the posts. Topics were categorised in
three themes: new ideas, problems and positive comments
on the application. Most of the new ideas referred to
design recommendations and new functionalities in the
context of the application. Some of the people suggested
possibilities for future development, ranging from high-
level descriptions to low-level pseudo-coding. Problems
mainly contained usability issues and bugs.. Intern
students, designers, and developers often replied to the
reported problems asking for further elaboration. Some
students used the forum to share their excitement about
the application (“I really like your ideas and this app! It
really makes life easier”).
Active engagement
Although we are too early in the use phase to reflect on
active engagement, throughout the Smart Campus project
we have been surprised by the enthusiastic participation
of some students. For example, during a full day
workshop aimed at discussing how to improve the
community involvement, a group of social science
students volunteered to carry out what they called the
"3000 challenge". Their proposal is to achieve a
community of up to 3000 members in less than three
months.
The lab is currently mediating between their enthusiasm
and the University in order to ensure maximum success to
the initiatives. Unfortunately, the University has not yet
embraced the project with the same enthusiasm and
rapidity as the students, but we are confident that
eventually conflicts will be overcome. In parallel, the
Erasmus Student Network has contacted us to take an
active role within Smart Campus. We are now reaching
the stage of publishing the apps on the Play Store: this
will be a key turning point of the project.
DISCUSSION
In the previous sections we have presented the iFame case
study; we now abstract from our experience and propose
an approach addressing two concurrent dimensions of
innovation infrastructuring, i.e., the social and technical
ones. Together these dimensions define an hourglass
structure, which can support PD and participatory
development in this extreme case where users themselves
develop the result of a PD study.
The hourglass approach
The hourglass is shaped by the two axes defined by the
social and technical dimensions (Figure 4). The upper
part of the hourglass structure concerns the design of the
artefact and culminates in the point of infrastructure
representing the iFame app: this is the moment in which
“an infrastructure becomes visible to its users” (Pipek and
Wulf, 2009) due to innovation, generating new local
practices at use time (represented in the lower part of the
hourglass structure). The hourglass shows the progressive
evolution of the social and technical infrastructuring
together with the kind of community involved at each
stage. The horizontal sections represent different subsets
of people with different degrees of involvement: the
darker the colour, the more involved the related group is.
Moreover, the size of each section also reflects the size of
its related group. For instance, the number of users
involved during the design phase in the fieldwork is much
larger than the number of users involved in participatory
18
development. Similarly, the number of users taking
advantage of the information contained in iFame is much
larger than the users actively engaging with new
development.
Figure 4. Hourglass approach.
The design process started with the field-work phase,
where we applied UCD techniques to understand who the
users were and set up the adequate context for the project.
In other words, we had to lay the foundations for our
infrastructuring endeavour, in order to better understand
the general domain and establish the conditions for
applying PD. This implied the involvement of a large user
base and the development of the platform and of the first
Smart Campus apps. Several activities were then put in
place to seed the community: UCD and PD practices were
incorporated into the academic career of computer
science students to whom the Smart Campus apps were
released for testing; in this way, this set of students was
equipped with the knowledge needed to evaluate the apps.
At the same time, several channels were set up to
facilitate the communication between students and the
Smart Campus staff. From this stage on, we moved from
the gathering of social needs to action, and from UCD to
PD: at this point the conceptual design of iFame began.
We finally moved to the participatory development phase
with the internship the iFame developers took at the
Smart Campus lab, actively contributing to the creation of
the app. During the design, we witnessed a constant self-
selection of the community, leading to a small number of
highly motivated people who built iFame as a tool fed
back to the community itself. However, most of the other
participants did not disappear but became potential
member of the community of users.
Similar to a grain of sand, iFame fell through the lower
part of the hourglass to be received by a community
characterised by different degrees of involvement, as
highlighted by the shades of colours in Figure 4. Most of
its members just profited from the information provided
by the app (opportunistic use); some of them, however,
contributed content to the app by commenting and rating
the food. A smaller group of users chose to contribute at a
higher level, reflecting on the app and on its
functionalities: they shared their opinions with the staff
and the rest of the community through the communication
channels available. Finally, even though we are just
entering this stage, we have some evidence of the
willingness of some members of the community to
engage even more actively by contributing to the further
development of the technical and social infrastructuring,
in different ways according to their different skills. For
instance, technically-skilled users are more likely to
become part of the development group, yet we are
witnessing increasing interest from social science
students offering their help for future functionalities and
community establishment.
The hourglass is a temporal process where the social and
the technical infrastructures developed synergistically. By
the time we reached the stage of participatory
development, we had also created a receptive
environment through the incubation in the lab (which
provided technological, political, organizational and
logistic support), the establishment of the platform as a
technological infrastructure, and an acceptance of
participation also at an institutional level (instead of the
limited political support we received in the early stages of
the project, especially for what concerned the choice of
services to be implemented). Moreover, a knowledge base
instrumental to the PD phase was built, for instance by
incorporating PD practices into the academic career of
participating students. As users go through the hourglass,
they are more and more exposed to methodologies and
techniques about what to design, social innovation and
PD. The hourglass also represents a dynamic system that
in some cases can be turned upside down: the community
can feed new requirements into the process, starting a
new cycle of innovation.
Considerations
The hourglass approach unfolds on the process of
infrastructuring. We frame this concept on the proposal of
(Björgvinsson et al., 2010), and we apply it to an ICT
innovation project in a University campus. Furthermore,
we contribute to research on work-infrastructure (Pipek
and Wulf, 2009) with an emphasis on public settings and
a stronger emphasis on the social stream. To facilitate this
process we propose the use of infrastructure probes not
only as artefacts aimed at bridging the gap between use
and design (Dörner et al., 2008; Gaver et al., 1999), but
also as materials for reflection as in the case of our apps.
The use that people did of these materials allowed
evaluating the technology and served as a source of
inspiration for both users and designers.
The hourglass approach integrates and expands previous
proposals to social innovation. The beginning of the
design phase resembles a crowdsourcing approach in the
emphasis put on the wisdom of a large number of people
(Surowiecki, 2005), but it aims at transforming the crowd
into an active community. The participatory steps unfold
on democratizing innovation (Björgvinsson et al., 2010),
but they push the boundaries of participation to the
physical assembly of the artefact. However, rather than
pursuing a EUD approach (Fischer et al., 2004), we relied
on the different skills of a self-selected community of
19
volunteers. The student developers can resemble lead-
users (Von Hippel, 2005) in that they have special skills:
however, in the hourglass approach they spontaneously
emerged from the social infrastructure, rather than being
selected based on some unique characteristics. We do not
believe that these students were able to identify needs
before other people did, or were better positioned to
obtain a solution to those needs; instead, involving a
smaller group of students was the practical approach to
move towards the development of the envisioned designs
while incorporating the feedback provided by the larger
group.
The co-evolution of the social and technical
infrastructures allows coping with issues of scaling
(Dalsgaard, 2010), adapting to the innovation milieu
(Björgvinsson et al., 2010), and defining responsibilities
(Kensing and Blomberg, 1998). To scale and reach a
larger number of potential users we exploited a variety of
techniques from UCD; furthermore, participation to the
project was integrated into practice, and evaluated as part
of students’ curriculum. In this way, students were
educated to new perspectives on design and participation
while being given immediate recognition of the
importance of their involvement. The potential of this
approach is witnessed by the many students who
maintained an active role in the project well after the
course was over.
The hourglass approach originated in a specific
innovation milieu: a mid-size University campus in
Europe characterized by limited possibilities for direct
participation. Since the beginning of the design, we had
the opportunity of working together with the students, yet
the selections of roles they could play was initially
constrained to that of evaluators, as they were denied a
role in decision-making. However, the milieu has been
changing during the project as students had a strong voice
in the design of iFame and an application for student
assessments of the educational offering is currently under
development. This suggests that we succeeded in creating
a space for community-based development, and at the
same time in creating a receptive environment for
participation. However, exporting this approach from the
campus to the city of Trento might pose additional
challenges (e.g. diversity, motivation for engagement);
and citizens' opinions might complement or confront with
those of university students. However, we are confident
that the established socio-technical infrastructure will
help us better understand and respond to the complexity
of the city as innovation milieu. Infrastructuring provides
the required resources to take action when addressing
different matters of concerns (Le Dantec and Di Salvo,
2013); participation can help discussion among different
opinions, but.
The staged process proposed by the hourglass model
facilitates the definition of responsibilities in a dynamic
environment. Designers fine-tuned their intervention
preparing a technical (through the development of the
platform) and social ground (through the application of
UCD techniques and a progressive involvement of
institutional stakeholders) to maximise participants’ gains
and minimise failures (Bossen et al., 2012). These two
streams evolved in parallel to create the social and
technical conditions for the actual pursuit of social
innovation: however, neither of them alone was sufficient
to achieve this goal, and thus they needed to intersect at
some point (in our case study, generating iFame). The
staged process was particularly adapted to a context that
is not historically and culturally oriented to public
participation. For instance, the fact that the canteen
community and the forum constituted channels where
comments and user-generated content could help
monitoring the quality of service was seen as a
controversial point by the University, which feared that
these channels would be used in an inappropriate way:
our social and technological intervention has allowed
them to overcome these worries. On the other hand, user
participation also raised some difficulties; bringing user
representatives through the hourglass is especially hard in
the moment of unpopular decisions. For example, in
several occasions the iFame developers showed resistance
to change when the design or the choice of functionalities
were constrained by political opportunity or technical
unfeasibility, or when they addressed “matters of
concern” they did not personally share: for instance, the
app does not account for special dietary requirements,
even though this point was frequently raised by different
user groups.
The domain of students as users might appear somewhat
constrained and limiting of the validity of achieved
results: however, we have witnessed a great variability in
it, for instance in the needs of students whose
departments were located in different districts of the city.
This appeared particularly clear in the early UCD phase,
where the user sample was larger, rather than in the
participatory development phase. It should be noted that
reducing the number of involved actors during the
process necessarily implies carrying along values that are
representative of this. Another limitation is the fact that
only a selected number of stakeholders were involved in
the project: in the case of iFame, for instance, none of the
canteen staff was consulted during the process. However,
the existence of the infrastructure now allows us to
overcome this point.
FINAL REMARKS
Nurturing and maintaining “infrastructures” are among
the main challenges that bottom-up approaches to
innovation are currently facing. These challenges are
intensified if innovation is the hub where research,
education and business converge. Involving and
accommodating different stakeholders and activities to
unfolding situations requires a shift from current
approaches adopted in these areas that entails constant
dialog among stakeholders, modification of current
processes, and the capability to adjust to changing
circumstances. The hourglass approach we propose to
social innovation in ICT can facilitate these processes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank all the Smart Campus team, in particular Sylvie
Noel and Cristina Core, and all the students who have
been developing and evaluating iFame. We also wish to
thank TrentoRISE and the University of Trento for their
monetary and institutional support.
20
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