Abstract
Citizen-led design approaches enable spaces for communities to explore and negotiate their priorities into actionable strategies. Digital technologies have played a paramount role in encouraging them to have a stronger voice in public services, local democracy and their wellbeing. However, these approaches might exacerbate barriers to equity and just participation. Moreover, in some domains (e.g., education, healthcare or urban planning), those stakeholders that "hold the power" are reluctant to partake in genuine participatory approaches. Given this situation, systemic design can transform citizen engagement practices to strengthen the connectedness among citizens and create awareness of the relational attributes of societal issues. This systemic lens could then help in the transition towards responsible communities that recognise themselves as part of the wider (problematic) system, be able to identify leverage points to face existing societal complex crises. This track aims to explore and reflect on the following questions: How to enable citizens to recognise themselves as interrelated actors that have an impact on collective wellbeing and flourishing? How can collective agency and relational autonomy be creatively and fairly embedded in individual decisions? How could systemic design be used to empower vulnerable groups to map out their future wellbeing in their local community? How can systemic inequalities become design principles to break perpetuated harming structures? How to explore efficient systemic design strategies to understand the complexity of social systems in an interdisciplinary research environment? How do we nurture societies to learn and strengthen bonds after negative consequences of a ‘failure’ community initiative?
Keywords
Systemic Design, Citizen-led Design, Shared-power Design, Creative Data Engagement, Participatory Design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.142
Citation
Landa-Avila, C., Zhao, S., Celik, S., Bagchi, P., and Brodersen Hansen, N. (2024) Systemic citizens: Equity, power, and relational autonomy, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.142
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Systemic citizens: Equity, power, and relational autonomy
Citizen-led design approaches enable spaces for communities to explore and negotiate their priorities into actionable strategies. Digital technologies have played a paramount role in encouraging them to have a stronger voice in public services, local democracy and their wellbeing. However, these approaches might exacerbate barriers to equity and just participation. Moreover, in some domains (e.g., education, healthcare or urban planning), those stakeholders that "hold the power" are reluctant to partake in genuine participatory approaches. Given this situation, systemic design can transform citizen engagement practices to strengthen the connectedness among citizens and create awareness of the relational attributes of societal issues. This systemic lens could then help in the transition towards responsible communities that recognise themselves as part of the wider (problematic) system, be able to identify leverage points to face existing societal complex crises. This track aims to explore and reflect on the following questions: How to enable citizens to recognise themselves as interrelated actors that have an impact on collective wellbeing and flourishing? How can collective agency and relational autonomy be creatively and fairly embedded in individual decisions? How could systemic design be used to empower vulnerable groups to map out their future wellbeing in their local community? How can systemic inequalities become design principles to break perpetuated harming structures? How to explore efficient systemic design strategies to understand the complexity of social systems in an interdisciplinary research environment? How do we nurture societies to learn and strengthen bonds after negative consequences of a ‘failure’ community initiative?