Prototyping open digital tools for urban commoning

ABSTRACT

The paper will discuss an experimental co-design approach to the development of a digital toolkit prototype and a resulting set of co-design principles, which are put forward as a way of infrastructuring future design of digital tools for urban commoning. Focus is placed on the case study of a commoning hub in a Parisian suburb where the toolkit was co-designed through a series of prototyping workshops, carried out with hub users and addressing key hub needs. The prototyping process explored possibilities for re-appropriating and re-framing existing digital technologies as open toolkits, which can be further re-purposed by users, here and beyond, after the design of an initial toolkit prototype.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital tools
• urban commoning
• infrastructuring
• co-design
• analogue and digital prototyping

Acknowledgments

Agrocité group, AAA and Harriet Francis for her contributions to the organisation and recording of the Agrocité workshops; Public Works, StudioBasar and their collaborators.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://596acres.org/.

2. http://r-urban.net/en/.

3. This was tested in the subsequent case studies by a research team member who did not have an IT background or technological training.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission under Grant H2020-MSCA-IF-2014_ST.