This article is a case study of a college-based storytelling initiative in Boston that seeks to transform dominant narratives of gun violence that are harmful and dehumanising by centring those most impacted. It builds on practices of critical making which can be understood as the externalisation of critical thinking into the creation of a shared artefact. When done collaboratively with community partners directly impacted by the intended outcome of the artefact, critical making can foster multiperspectivalism, awareness of injustices, and motivation to bring about change. In order for collaborative critical making to be adequately supported within higher education for these ends, novel infrastructure is necessary. Through an in depth analysis of the Transforming Narratives of Gun Violence initiative, we examine the infrastructure that supports collaborative critical making across three scales: the classroom, the college, and the community. We look across three dimensions: listening, expression, and governance. The article describes challenges and opportunities of working within higher education, and concludes with suggestions for future research.

Public servants tasked with implementing rules or policies on the street level often make discretionary decisions based on local context. Lipsky has labeled them street-level bureaucrats. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as most face-to-face interactions facilitated by local government moved online, many street-level decisions were moved to screens, representing the actions of whom Bouvins and Zouridis refer to as screen-level bureaucrats. Discretionary decision making among public servants continued, but much of it centered on the collection, analysis, and use of data. This article reports on research conducted in 2021 with municipal employees in a large northeastern city in the United States, and examines their changing relationship with data in determining how and to whom they deliver services. In the context of a public health crisis, public servants exercised “data discretion” to rapidly alter services and to internally advocate for underserved populations. The specific practices of discretionary decision making are explored through candid interviews with public servants. The discussion explores how these emergent practices might persist post crisis, how discretion is counterintuitively used to build trust in government, and how data discretion is not limited only to the progressive values manifested in the example of a northeastern city.

Codesign is a set of practices that facilitate collaboration in the design process, leading to shared investment in outcomes. This article reviews three cases applying visual art: 1) studying urban innovation in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2) convening people with lived healthcare experiences, and 3) developing cartoons for workshops on climate resilience. The results suggest that applied visual art has great potential to support codesign, specifically by signalling a novel procedure, motivating sideways thinking, inviting interpretation, and cultivating flexible outputs. The conclusion offers potential practitioners a set of decisions to consider for applying visual art to their own work.

This article reports on an urban living laboratory that designed a suite of play-based prototypes, as an attempt to "institution" collaborative smart city governance in the city of Boston. This project was called "Beta Blocks," and it geographically defined "Exploration Zones," governed by local residents and business owners, who decided whether, where, and why to temporarily install technologies in the public realm. To recruit and facilitate the participation of Zone Advisory Group members, the authors fabricated a lavender, parking-space-sized, inflatable art exhibition (Beta Blob) that hosted a suite of public-facing activities. Although the composite model failed at "institutioning" itself into Boston's government through this prototype, the discrete components succeeded in centering play in public learning situations and prototyping a model for collaborative governance between publics, and the public and private sectors.

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for smart city governments to collaborate with communities to effectively provide care. To achieve this, smart city governments must combine smart, data-driven insights for crisis management with local knowledges that can support trusted networks. This requires the creation of decision-making spaces that address barriers of mistrust and misalignment of priorities between stakeholders, and that challenge traditional power dynamics. We introduce care-ful governance as mode of governance that proposes collective arrangements initiated by either (1) a local government or citizens, where citizens (2) actively participate in a project implementation and (3) have decision making power about its means and ends, (4) where the process is guided by the distribution of caring responsibilities (5) for the common good. We then focus on the case study of the People’s Collaborative Governance Network, an urban living lab in Boston that gathered community members, city government workers, students, and researchers with the purpose of holding space for the creation of prototypes toward the democratic distribution of caring responsibilities.

This article introduces Deep Listening, a novel transdisciplinary research agenda and framework for collaborative climate adaptation. It argues for the urgency to develop a communication approach in understanding how frontline communities interact with mediating institutions. Deep Listening is presented in five components: 1) knowledge sharing (mutually agreed upon protocols for data production and use); 2) holding space (co-creating spaces where institutional actors and communities can exchange, learn from each other and discuss); 3) the production and sharing of climate imaginaries (where local or Indigenous knowledge and community values are respected); 4) sensemaking with a diversity of perspectives and scientific data; and 5) evaluation and monitoring support to assure accountability and to assess quality of information. Based on a literature review of adaptation studies, the case is made that the Deep Listening approach can enhance the sense of procedural justice and mitigate maladaptive outcomes.

The study of educational simulations at the secondary level has typically centered on programs that are competitive, shorter in duration, and characterized by their low fidelity, or a lack of realism. The resources required to hold longer, more immersive, and nuanced programs are often prohibitive for teachers of political science programs. As such, their effects on student learning outcomes have remained relatively unknown. In this paper, we explore the impact of a Mod& G20 (MG20) curriculum for high school and early college-aged students on students' sense of self-efficacy and 21st century skills. MG20 is a weeklong, immersive international conference modeled after the re& G20 summit. In it, students learn about global governance and roleplay as heads of state and government ministers to negotiate for their collective interests. Using a mixed methods approach, we examine student learning outcomes from two MG20 summits, held in the United States and in the UK. Results show that internationally diverse, immersive, collaborative role-playing simulations significantly improve students' self-ascribed cross-cultural communication and public speaking skills, as well as students' sense self-efficacy. This research suggests future study into new and emerging formats of educational simulations may reveal greater potential for such programs to enhance student learning.

Upon release from prison, women face barriers in every step of their journey home, with most reentry services designed for men. With virtual reality (VR) headsets increasingly affordable and normalized as a mental health treatment modality, VR is being adopted by prisons around the United States. We argue that the risks and affordances of VR in this political context necessitate centering those with lived experience as creative agents to avoid designing media that re-traumatizes, reduces the complexities of reentry, and reproduces oppressive prisoner–guard dynamics. This article documents and analyzes the design process of a VR reentry program for a state prison to help incarcerated women practice responding to high-stress reentry situations, prior to their release. The resulting VR prototype draws on therapeutic VR work but takes a community-based participatory design approach. We conclude by discussing the institutional and cultural tensions of implementing a participatory design process in a US state prison system.

A case study in community-driven air quality science, advocacy, and collaborative governance is presented. A framework of multi-stakeholder planning and execution was employed to identify needs and opportunities, propose work, secure funding, and communicate results to a variety of audiences. Research outputs were primarily designed to support community-based capacity building, advocacy and collaborative governance to promote air health in the near-airport environmental justice communities in Boston, MA.

Abstract Public trust in civic organizations is low. And many public-serving organizations assume that greater efficiency will build trust. As a result, they are quick to adopt new technologies to enhance what they do. However, efficiency, in the sense of charting a path to a goal with the least amount of friction, can sometimes be at odds with the goal of building trust. This book is about those practices that challenge the normative applications of “smart technologies” in order to build or repair trust with publics. Based on over 60 interviews with change makers in public-serving organizations throughout the United States, as well as detailed case studies, this book provides a practical and deeply philosophical picture of civic life in transition. It is a book about design, but not necessarily about designers. Without coordinating, these civic designers embedded within organizations have adopted an approach to public engagement we call “meaningful inefficiencies,” or the deliberate design of less efficient over more efficient means of achieving some ends. This book illustrates how civic designers are creating meaningful inefficiencies in less than ideal conditions and encourages a rethinking of how innovation within public-serving organizations is understood, applied, and sought after. Different from market innovation, civic innovation is not just about invention and novelty; it is concerned with building communities around novelty, and cultivating deep and persistent trust. It involves a plurality of publics (not just a single public good); it creates the conditions for those publics to play; and it results in people caring for the world.

This study examines the participatory design process of a virtual reality (VR) reentry training program with a women's prison. Conceptually drawing on previous work in VR exposure training, this prototype consists of guided, first-person 3D-360° video episodes that depict psychologically stressful situations that women commonly face when returning home. Critical story and production elements, including screenplay, acting, and narration, were created with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women. The institutional, technological, and cultural restrictions of prison, combined with the tensions of making media with often exploited groups, forced adaptations of participatory design methods. The inclusion of incarcerated female voices resulted in an immersive narrative that reflects this group's specific challenges. The next phase is to evaluate its efficacy against non-immersive comparative trainings for reentry-related anxieties.

This article reports on a qualitative study of community based organizations' (CBOs) adoption of information communication technologies (ICT). As ICTs in the civic sector, otherwise known as civic tech, get adopted with greater regularity in large and small organizations, there is need to understand how these technologies shape and challenge the nature of civic work. Based on a nine-month ethnographic study of one organization in Boston and additional interviews with fourteen other organizations throughout the United States, the study addresses a guiding research question: how do CBOs reconcile the changing (increasingly mediated) nature of civic work as ICTs, and their effective adoption and use for civic purposes, increasingly represent forward-thinking, progress, and innovation in the civic sector?-of civic tech as a measure of "keeping up with the times." From a sense of top-down pressures to innovate in a fast-moving civic sector, to changing bottom-up media practices among community constituents, our findings identify four tensions in the daily practice of civic tech, including: 1) function vs. representation, 2) amplification vs. transformation, 3) grassroots vs. grasstops, and 4) youth vs. adults. These four tensions, derived from a grounded theory approach, provide a conceptual picture of a civic tech landscape that is much more complicated than a suite of tools to help organizations become more efficient. The article concludes with recommendations for practitioners and researchers.

Civic media describes a set of media practices that seek to challenge the norms of the institutions that mediate civic life, including government, the press, and civil society. Civic media practice strives to achieve a strong social infrastructure and longevity through caring practices over time. This entry explains the nature of caring practices and articulates a vision for identifying and assessing civic media at a time of deep distrust in civic institutions.

In the last decade, digital media technologies and developments have given rise to exciting new forms of ludic, or playful, engagements of citizens in cultural and societal issues. From the Occupy movement to playful city-making to the gameful designs of the Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, and the rise of citizen science and ecological games, this book shows how play is a key theoretical, methodological, and practical principle for comprehending such new forms of civic engagement in a mediatized culture. The Playful Citizen explores how and through what media we are becoming more playful as citizens and how this manifests itself in our ways of doing, living, and thinking. We offer a pluralistic answer to such questions by bringing together scholars from different fields such as game and play studies, social sciences, and media and culture studies.