Community-Based Design
Methods WorkshopCommunity-Based Design
Methods WorkshopWorkshop URL: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mattkam/community_workshop/
YahooGroup URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cbdesign/
Co-organizers: Gregory Wolff, John Canny and Matthew Kam
To make this event accessible to all participants, we plan to rotate each workshop between different locations in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Third workshop: April 23, 2005 at the Berkeley Institute of Design. This workshop was especially ambitious and was organized as part of the United Nations-Berkeley "Bridging the Divide" conference.
Second workshop: January 20, 2005 at Stanford University.
Inaugural workshop: November 18, 2004 at the Berkeley Institute of Design.
As part of our interest in designing technologies for underserved communities, we are organizing this series of monthly, half-day workshops. Currently, much attention focuses on how multidisciplinary teams could design tools and technology solutions with client users. In contrast to designing for an end-user community, how can we design as a community of users, designers and other stakeholders? We envision design as a collaborative activity that involves multiple parties associated with a community of practice. Such a partnership will empower communities to build local capacity to meet local needs, and in the process, develop the means to be truly self-sustaining.
During the second workshop, everyone expressed a desire to translate lessons from the discussions into some tangible output. To that end, a participant suggested creating a "Working Papers" repository. This repository would publish papers produced by subsequent workshops that bring different groups (designers, developers, researchers, social entrepreneurs, etc.) to the table. Each paper would hopefully discuss (and hopefully demonstrate) practical solutions and issues for a particular, narrowly defined problem common to many underserved contexts. Hopefully, such a repository could spur other workshops and become the place for people developing systems to go to get good starting points for the issues they face.
I can be
contacted at mattkam@cs.berkeley.edu
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