Shacking up at Sharing Cities
At Sharing Cities, an event in Barcelona this November, Platoniq shared some of the work and insights from working on OpenHeritage and with Design Justice, which aligned well with the Sharing Cities programme which focused on platform labour, inclusion, and gender, and data commons.
When we think about platforms, many have a one size fits all design regardless of who is using it and where. However, much of the overlap between OpenHeritage and Platoniq´s work revolves around co-creating spaces and tools on and offline for wider participation and greater inclusivity. This can mean that often Platoniq tweaks and changes the Decidim platform in order to better serve different communities, places, and needs. One of the most important co-creations to have happened within Platoniq’s collaboration at OpenHeritage has been the new features developed on Decidim for the six OH labs.
So far there have been four proposed tools or features. To see the proposals check it out here, on our Decidim platform for OH. These features were created to facilitate more creative ways for communities to interact both digitally and offline. More importantly, they were created with specific sites in Sunderland, London Prädikow, Berlin and Prague, Warsaw in mind. As a result they respond to very different contexts and places.
Present at Sharing Cities, was Oliver with Decidim, The Game to play and workshop with the participants at the festival on participatory processes in their communities. Also there as one of the main organisers and promoters of the Mediterranean node of the Design Justice network was Elena from the Platoniq team who joined forces with Marta Delatte (Liquen Data Lab), Sasha Constanza Shock (Design Justice network Steering Committee and MIT), Mayo Fuster (Dimmons IN3) and Thais Ruiz de Alda (Digital Fems) to present the work of Design Justice and to launch the recently founded Mediterranean node (please watch this space for the Pisa gathering report!).
The Design Justice session at the Sharing cities focused on a hands-on workshop analyzing the context of the Smart Cities Expo World Congress and to what extent the fair and the projects showcased in it are harmful or positively contributing to communities, cities and the planet. We did so by running a participatory workshop analyzing the Smart cities and the Sharing cities fairs through the Design Justice principles and engaging in a conversation on whether they reproduce or challenge the so-called Matrix of domination along axes of race, class, gender, ability or location.
We asked the ever important questions in any design process of: Who benefits from the technological products and services showcased? Who is harmed? Who was involved in their creation?
Needless to say we shook things up at Sharing Cities by centering not the design or the designer, but the idea of participation and those who might be most profoundly impacted.
