'Pervasive Participation – New Horizons for Citizen Involvement and User Experience'

Abstract

Over the last decade, various governments across the globe have invested in efforts aimed at a more participatory governance that would bring citizens and representatives closer together while benefiting both sides. These efforts include informing citizens about ongoing and future plans in city making, facilitating dialogues between those two groups, as well as empowering citizens to resolve issues themselves. Holding advantages for the different stakeholders, involving citizens in various stages of decision-making processes might not only increase transparency and eventually trust, but also raise their acceptance of the decisions being made. The aim is to ultimately improve satisfaction and the quality of life [1]. Recent technological advances in participation processes allow the ability to place the efforts described above into practice. In an attempt to also mitigate common barriers to engagement (e.g. spatial, temporal; [2]), practitioners and scholars have started to move away from traditional approaches to public participation and towards technology-mediated approaches, referred to as e-participation [3]. In essence, this approach describes the utilization of information and communication technology (ICT) to broaden and deepen participation in policy development processes [4]. ICT enables citizens to connect with one another as well as with their elected representatives with little effort. However, the challenge is to engage them and capture their interests. The first generation of tools facilitating citizen engagement employed were geographic information systems (GIS). These allowed citizens to respond to questions from the city administration concerning particular locations in the city (e.g. where to build new bikeways). GIS tools mainly provided citizens with information on ongoing and current plans as well as gave them the opportunity to provide feedback on those. To that extent, these map-based engagement tools in their original form and function implemented an information provision and top-down engagement [5]. A practical restriction of GIS-based engagement systems is that due to their complexity (i.e. detailed maps) they are usually best viewed on larger screens or laptops. Although GIS-based systems allow engagement anytime while mitigating barriers of traditional engagement forms (e.g. opening hours of town hall meetings), they are still place-bound. The same issue applies to early web-based engagement platforms. However, these allowed citizens to not only respond to predefined topics but also introduce their own concerns by raising issues and proposing ideas, hence enabling bottom-up engagement. In this focus section, we present the current state and new horizons for the next generation of e-participation: Pervasive Participation [6]. The goal of this research field is to unleash the potential of feature-rich smartphones and instrumented urban environments for the domain of citizen engagement. The main idea of this concept is to enable inclusive, efficient and sustainable engagement by mitigating traditional barriers to participation. Hope put into pervasive participation pertains to providing Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal IxD&A, N.35, 2017, pp. 135-140