Wild at Home: The Neighborhood as a Living Laboratory for HCI.

What is it about?

HCI can “turn to the wild” but still stay home. Local community life presents a rich context for under-standing challenges and possibilities of information technology. We summarize and reflect upon a program of participatory design research in which we facilitated activities and experiences of our neighbors through developing a series of community-oriented programs and information systems through the past two dec-ades. We organize these reflections around five overlapping themes: visibility of community actors, crea-tion of community information infrastructures, the role of place-based identity and activity in community, the effectiveness of participatory relationships, and the research designs and methods appropriate. We frame these reflections around a conceptual model of community, and the suggestion that the local com-munity can be a living laboratory for HCI in the wild.

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Why is it important?

We describe a project in community informatics carried out during the past two decades. During this period, we resided in the university towns of Blacksburg, Virginia, and State College, Pennsylvania. The wild places we studied were the communities of our own hometowns, following the venerable tradition in sociology of regarding community as a living laboratory. We established relatively long-term participatory design relationships with a diverse collection of local stakeholders – schoolteachers and administrators, librarians, senior citizens, leaders and volunteers in non-profit service organizations, gov-ernment and business leaders. The deliberately value-based, but still quite open-ended challenge we posed to ourselves and to our partners in this project was how we might recruit and develop information technology to enhance our community. As design research, these projects evoked and elaborated diverse understandings of community, what it is and how it works, through pursuing the question of what community can be.

Perspectives