CHI 2018 Video Showcase
CHI 2018, April 21–26, 2018, Montréal, QC, Canada
Participatory Design Fiction: Community Storytelling for Speculative Urban Technologies Figure 1: Team of university students and community residents rapid-prototyping wearable technologies during a workshop session. The workshop participant size varied from week to week, with 4 regular students, 2 occasional students, and 2-9 community participants (ranging from ages 15-72).
Karl Baumann
Ben Caldwell
University of Southern California
Kaos Network Art Center
Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
Los Angeles, CA 90008, USA
[email protected]
[email protected]
François Bar
Benjamin Stokes
University of Southern California
American University
Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
Washington, DC 20016, USA
[email protected]
[email protected]
Abstract
Figure 2: Speculative mockup of augmented reality glasses that reveal urban history and ‘deep ancestral time.’ The mockup derived from an older community participant linking his cultural beliefs with emerging technology.
This video was produced as part of the participatory speculative design project “Sankofa City.” The project engages community residents to design emerging technologies (e.g. augmented reality, ubicomp, and self-driving cars) tied to their cultural practices. This collaboration is based in the African-American neighborhood of Leimert Park, in South Los Angeles. With increasing urban development in the area, residents are concerned about cultural displacement. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for thirdparty components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). © 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). CHI'18 Extended Abstracts, April 21–26, 2018, Montreal, QC, Canada ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5621-3/18/04. https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3186601
In this twelve-week workshop series, local residents worked with university students (Figure 1) to design and plan their neighborhood’s future. Groups began by brainstorming high-level concepts through “what if” hypothetical questions. Then they created prototypes and scenarios based on their user personas, which were inspired by local residents. Lastly, they created seven collages (Figure 2) and a design fiction video to share at a local stakeholders’ meeting, in order to gather larger community feedback. The video portrays an ARenabled self-driving shuttle that dynamically displays local history. The video was particularly effective for gaining community buy-in and has since been shown at a number of local events and festivals. By grounding speculative designs in a community context, students and residents imagined novel technologies that support Leimert Park’s local economy and project their cultural heritage into the unknown future.
Author Keywords Participatory Design; Speculative Design; Design Fiction; Augmented Reality; Autonomous Vehicles.
ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous;
.
VS09, Page1
