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Platforms and Design for the Caring Economy

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Please join us for the training school ‘Platforms and Design for the Caring Economy’, part of the COST Action CA16121, “From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy”.

The aim of the training school is to present cases, technologies and design methods for the caring economy communities. We will focus on active participation, participatory design and platforms that help participants form their own communities.  The audience is early career researchers who have a background and interest in the design of interactive technology.

Background and Goal

Aarhus University has a long tradition for research in participatory design, with strong roots in the Scandinavian tradition for Participatory Design (PD), which combines the areas of technology development and use with a broader interest in participative practices at the workplace and beyond. The current research is working to provide alternatives that are transparent and malleable by users together, in inclusive communities, where users are not just passive providers of data.

Aarhus University is the home of the Centre for Participatory IT (PIT, http://pit.au.dk/), which is hosting an annual summer symposium (SummerPIT). This will overlap with this training school and provide a way to connect participating early career researchers with a diverse and interesting community of researchers in the field.

Similarly, Aarhus University hosts the ERC project CIO (cs.au.dk/cio) which specifically addresses collaborative and malleable technologies. CIO will support the training school and results from CIO will be presented.

This proposed training school will make use of lectures, panels discussions and workshops with established academics, initially from invited speakers, and later in the week by joining with the SummerPIT 2019 event. The activities will provide conceptual understanding as well as constructive and generative means for working with communities in the caring economy.

Program

See the detailed pogram

The training school will involve keynotes and discussions on topics of participatory design, platform cooperatives, value sensitive design, and how different these and related theoretical concepts can be put into practice, following an excursion to a local co-housing/production project. Our speakers who will present on these topics include Anne Marie Kanstrup, Colin Clark, Daisy Yoo and Susanne Bødker. In the second half of the week, the training school will join with SummerPIT 2019 and hear morning talks and discussions on the topics of understandable AI, evaluation, and research through design and artistic practices, before engaging in group activities in the afternoon. The full program will be available here soon.

The training course, including preparatory reading and a written summary at the end, will give a course credit of 5 ECTS for those interested.