Laying the foundations for public participation and value advocacy: interaction design for a large scale urban simulation

Supporting public participation is often a key goal in the design of digital government systems. However, years of work may be required before a complex system, such as the UrbanSim urban simulation system, is deployed and ready for such participation. In this paper, we investigate laying the foundations for public participation in advance of wide-scale public deployment, with the goal of having interaction designs ready when the system is put into such use. Moreover, in a highly politicized domain such as this one, value advocacy as well as factual information plays a central role. Using the theory and methods of Value Sensitive Design, we address three design goals toward public participation and value advocacy, and provide evidence that each of them was achieved: (1) enabling indirect stakeholders to become direct stakeholders (i.e. enabling more people to interact directly with UrbanSim in useful ways); (2) developing a participatory process by which these stakeholders can help gu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DGO
• Authors: Batya Friedman, Alan Borning, Janet Davis, Brian T. Gill, Peter H. Kahn Jr., Travis Kriplean, Peyina Lin
• Keywords: DGO 2008, Education, Public Participation, Value Advocacy, Value Sensitive Design