Middle-out design: Collaborative community engagement in urban HCI

Abstract

This paper presents a collaborative approach for designing, implementing and deploying situated urban HCI interventions. It draws on field studies that use HCI technologies for collecting feedback from citizens. Based on an analysis of these field studies and a discussion of top-down and bottom-up initiatives currently used in community engagement we propose that both decision makers and local communities should be involved in the city making process. We relate our approach, which we refer to as middle-out design, to other co-design and participatory design movements in HCI and conclude on a discussion on how our work can contribute to the discourse around urban HCI particularly for the purpose of community engagement to inform change.