Play!UC and Traders conference ‘Design, Social Media and Technology to foster Civic Self-organisation’ on 21-22 May, Hasselt, Belgium. Abstracts 17 until November 2014.

Ever since the turn of the millennium, countries all over Europe are increasingly witnessing situations in which citizens are demanding a more direct form of democracy, ranging from a cry for more information, to being involved in actual decision-making procedures, and even to get the autonomy to (partly) self-organize. At the same time, governments of these countries are increasingly putting citizen participation at the centre of their policy objectives, striving for more transparency, the coproduction of public projects, and even the empowerment of local people and communities to self-organize and take up part of the decision power (e.g. the idea of the ‘Big Society’ in the UK and the ‘Participation Society’ in the Netherlands).

Three issues for discussion
Design, social media and technology have been put forward as a way to operationalise this multitude. Design refers here both to the analogue and the virtual, the temporary and the permanent and can range from the scale of objects to cities. Social media refers to digital applications supporting posting, sharing, commenting, rating, etc. And technology refers to hardware such as urban screens, smart tags, geo-referenced sensors. The objective of this conference is to discuss three issues related to the implementation of this multitude.

We welcome exploratory and full papers on:

• Design, social media and technology as an encouragemet and empowerment for citizens to take part in and/or start up civic self-organisation practices.
• Sustaining civic self-organisation practises over longer time periods within a diversity of socio-economic contexts with design, social media.
• The documentation and evaluation of the impact of design, social media and technology on civic self-organisation practices.

Deadline for abstracts:  17th November 2014 .

More information:  Hasselt Universiteit

This conference is organized in collaboration with:

• Play!UC – Playing with Urban Complexity –  JPI Urban Europe
• TRADERS – Training Art and Design Researchers in Participation for Public Space – a Marie Curie Multi-ITN project