Christopher Le Dantec: Designing Publics
Abstract: This talk addresses how community-based design can be developed to sustain interventions for community engagement and empowerment. Christopher Le Dantec argues that by building atop PD, designers working in community settings are not simply creating end products, but are designing publics: socio-technical articulations that address the different tensions, boundaries, and values present in community contexts.
These publics are supported by three pillars used to shape the design space and provide end-points against which to assess or reflect on the designed outcomes: issues are the first pillar and act as a concrete bounding to both the public and the design space—it is through the articulation of issues that individuals form into publics; attachments describe the relationships that develop between the public and the definitional issues— attachments carry bi-direction relations as “dependencies on” or “commitments to” different resources, constituencies, or desired outcomes; finally infrastructuring describes the design work of integrating socio-technical responses to issues by way of expressing, forming, and altering the attachments contained within the public. Le Dantec will explore the framing of issues, attachments, and infrastructuring through several different examples derived from past and present community-based projects.
Christopher Le Dantec is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. His research in Human- Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is focused on integrating theoretical, empirical, and design-based investigations of community technologies.
With an interest in digital disparities, he examines alternate constraints on mobile computing in urban life, information technology and social institutions, and the use of participatory design for articulating social issues and constructing publics. His research touches a number of different domains, including: computer-supported cooperative work, social computing, urban computing, human- computer interaction, and values in design.