This project is developed through an ongoing collaboration with the Historic Westside Cultural Arts Council. Through a series of design workshops and public events, we are co-designing mobile and social technologies to help cultivate a shared community identity to support local civic engagement. By working directly with community members, we are able to build technology platforms suited to their specific needs and which amplify their values and concerns as the community goes through significant changes.
The Participatory Publics Lab is a group of researchers concerned with community engagement and design. We are part of the Digital Media program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.
We explore the design of mobile and social media in the context of community development and activism. We do this through different modes of participation: in the design of these technologies; in the development of discourses about these technologies; in the use, adoption, and appropriation of these technologies.
We investigate forms of civic and community engagement through participatory design, design research, ethnographic research, and critical scholarship. Our research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and as part of the Intel Science and Technology Center in Social Computing (ISTC-Social).
