Abstract
Digital community platforms have transformed civic participation, enhancing social belonging and shared responsibility. Yet, they intensify the digital divide between people. This can be a risk to their fundamental human value of dignity. This paper explores designing for dignity within digital community platforms through a qualitative study conducted in South Holland, The Netherlands. Twenty citizens participated in semi-structured interviews to investigate their understanding, experiences, frustrations and expectations of dignity in digital interactions. The study confirmed dignity’s multifaceted nature (14 distinct definitions), varied expectations of respectful treatment, and common challenges in using government digital services. Only 30% of participants felt these platforms respected their dignity, the rest expressed negative experiences such as feeling helpless, stupid, frustrated, anxious, etc. Participants emphasized needs such as language support, clarity, and navigation assistance, as well as design requirements. The findings will be validated in participatory design sessions of co-creating a dignified digital community platform.
Keywords
Design for dignity, Community platform, Design for values, Participation
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.400
Citation
Abou Eddahab-Burke, F., and Bauer, K. (2026) Exploring designing for dignity in the context of digital community platforms, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.400
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Exploring designing for dignity in the context of digital community platforms
Digital community platforms have transformed civic participation, enhancing social belonging and shared responsibility. Yet, they intensify the digital divide between people. This can be a risk to their fundamental human value of dignity. This paper explores designing for dignity within digital community platforms through a qualitative study conducted in South Holland, The Netherlands. Twenty citizens participated in semi-structured interviews to investigate their understanding, experiences, frustrations and expectations of dignity in digital interactions. The study confirmed dignity’s multifaceted nature (14 distinct definitions), varied expectations of respectful treatment, and common challenges in using government digital services. Only 30% of participants felt these platforms respected their dignity, the rest expressed negative experiences such as feeling helpless, stupid, frustrated, anxious, etc. Participants emphasized needs such as language support, clarity, and navigation assistance, as well as design requirements. The findings will be validated in participatory design sessions of co-creating a dignified digital community platform.