CIID Final Project (Pt. 1)

Initial Reflections

6 min readSep 11, 2016

Name: Inês Araújo
Nationality: Portuguese
Background: UI & Visual Design

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I want my Final Project to …

Personally, I would like my final project to make me grow as a researcher and to give me the confidence and motivation to pursue more self driven projects. I would also like it to serve as an example to showcase the work that I can and want to do in the future, so that when I reach out to possible collaborators and clients I have something relevant to show. Lastly, I would like it to reflect my interests and ideas and hopefully generate some conversation around the topic chosen.

I’m interested in/inspired by…

Politics, Civic Participation and Education, Policy making, Global vs. Localized decision making, and Citizen Data.

Civic Participation and agency

How can we drive more civic participation?
What services can we create / improve to bridge the gap between the government and citizens?
How can we give more agency to population and individuals to be drivers of positive change? How can we make people feel empowered to make things happen in their cities / countries?

Information

How can we make people more interested and informed about the decisions being made on their account by politicians?

New technologies + governance

What new ways of participation can technology bring us?
What about new ways of communication between government and citizens?
New ways to be a citizen (ex. provide data in exchange for value)

Education driving participation

The assumption is that if we drive participation from a young age they will then grow to become more active citizens as adults.

How can we drive people to be active citizens from a young age?
How do we better educate youngsters about democracy and civic participation?

This project is relevant because…

“In some countries, people use their vote to express their discontent,” Costa Pinto said in an interview. “In Portugal, many people simply decide not to vote because they are upset or don’t believe voting will make a big difference.”

Bloomberg

One of the main reasons for me to want to work on this subject is because I believe civic participation in Portugal is extremely low. People are completely disconnected from politics, except when they want to blame politicians for all that is wrong with the world. People are misinformed or not informed at all, sometimes not even interested in what’s being discussed and decided on their behalf. I think there are several reasons for this, but one major one because people believe they have almost zero agency or say in how things are done and how in change happens.

In Portugal voter turn-out (people in voting age that actually voted) for parliamentary elections has decreased from an outstanding 89.73% in 1975 to a mere 61.75% in 2015. Similar to other elections, going as low as 37.56% when it comes to European parliament.

When looking at some of the other countries in Europe I see similar patterns. Politics and governance have become complex matters, not easily accessible to most of us. Governments have become ever more distanced from the people.

Media coverage is often poor, and sensationalist, and people repeat what they hear, with little to no reflexion on the matters at stake.

People often even vote without understanding what’s at stake.

Brexit was an excellent example of this. After the polls closed Google searches spiked 250% on questions like “What happens if we leave the EU?”. Most of the people voting for leave were over 65 yr-old. Young people felt misrepresented and unheard.

Some extra thougts:

Should we listen more to the younger generations, who’ll be the ones to endure this kind of decisions for longer?
Shouldn’t we give citizens the agency and the resources they need to make positive change happen? Be those resources financial, new policies or frameworks to facilitate that change.

New trends and projects are arising where top-down management style is supported and inspired by a lot of bottom-up ideas.

During my Final Project I would like to challenge myself in…

I can rely on:

My comfort zone resides on UI & Visual Design, designing for digital platforms and graphic design in general.
I can also use these skills easily to create visualizations of systems and to communicate concepts.

Want to improve:

I certainly want to focus a lot of my time developing my research skills, doing in-depth user interviews, and uncovering insights. Finding a method and framework that works for me and this project, and fine-tuning it along the way.
I would like to be more at ease reaching out to someone about a project, and hopefully building some interesting and lasting connections on the subjects that are dear to my heart.

Bigger Challenges:

I will need to learn a lot about data, governance and politics in general, since I don’t come from that background and I’m not familiar with danish politics and initiatives.
Finding ways to keep myself on schedule and being productive without steering away. I know I can diverge a lot, so I need to make an extra effort to keep my focus and not get lost in philosophical thoughts.
If it comes to coding some sort of platform or building a physical object I know it will take me some time and it will be a challenge, so I need to set feasible goals and keep that in mind when making decisions.

Related projects

Cooperativa a Torre (Portuguese school that holds assembly for students since a very young age — 5–10 yr old)
Orçamento Participativo de Lisboa (Portuguese municipality platform for citizens to submit projects they would like to see happen in the city. Once a year people vote on these and the winners are implemented.)
Tele Panchayat (project by Manas Karambelkar — IDP 2012)
Edward Kennedy Institute (USA). Visiting Students get to experience the Senate and play a role as senators.
2015 Museum of Future Government Services (Tellart)
Catapult — Future cities (talk to John Lynch)
Smart urbanism
Massive Small
The need to involve younger people is identified by EU commission. Still the initiatives and language aren’t really successful in addressing this target group, and to a lot of youngsters this is absolutely unheard of. Example: https://europa.eu/youth/have-your-say_en
Vote Popup
MIT Civic Media group
Canada’s Open Parliament

Reading Materials

My starting point

I believe talking to some people about these matters should be my next step. Either advisors or people involved in politics and relevant projects could be of help to better define and confine my area of action.
Defining a more clear goal, target group and territory should also happen in the next couple of days at max.
After defining what that is, I’ll be digging deeper into that area, user group or system, whatever that means. Aiming to figure out what that is in the next 2–3 days max — hopefully.
I don’t know where this process will end up in terms of solution. It can be a platform, a service, a set of products, a digital product — I really don’t know yet.

My explorations so far

Tons of reflection and desk research.
Looked for articles and publications supporting my assumptions of what the problem is, looked at a lot of interesting projects and initiatives in the field, had some stupid ideas, had a great idea that sounded like eureka and then I found out that it sort of already exists (not the same but close).

Still trying to figure out what I’m actually trying to do here. Have too many ideas. Many of them are way too broad and I’m mostly finding it hard to find constraints that can help me define my goal into something that’s feasible in a 2 month period.

I’ll keep updating this section as it becomes clearer what I’m doing.