Discovering England’s Burial Spaces (DEBS) was a two-year project to develop new tools and resources in support of community-led recording of the above-ground archaeology and tangible heritage of burial spaces. This article focuses on the role community groups had in the process of designing and building parts of the new surveying workflow, paying particular attention to the design of the recording system, the role of new digital tools in supporting surveys, and the barriers that might prevent community groups from archiving their research. While the focus is very much on these issues as they played out within the DEBS project itself, the challenges encountered and lessons learnt have implications for Citizen Science projects more broadly, and for researchers and heritage professionals developing new methodologies and tools.

This paper presents a case study describing the use of design fiction in a cross-curricular project with four classes across two primary schools in inner-city Sheffield. The project combined elements of a Mantle of the Expert dramatic-inquiry approach with design thinking and design fiction, to explore the world of the honey bee. We worked with the schools and children during half a term, leading them through a set of activities (including drama, design, creative writing, and 3D prototyping) to enable the children to discover and understand the threats facing bees, beekeeping, pollination, and the global environmental ramifications of a world without bees. This paper describes the approach adopted and the created design fictions. We discuss the value and limitations of our approach and conclude by offering suggestions for researchers and teachers wishing to engage young people with complex problem spaces.

The design, development and deployment of new technology is a form of intervention on the social, psychological and physical world. Whether explicitly intended or not, all digital technology is designed to support some vision of how work, leisure, education, healthcare, and so on, is organised in the future [11]. For example, most efforts to make commercial systems more usable, efficient and pleasurable, are ultimately about the vision of increased profits as part of a capitalist society. This workshop will bring together researchers, designers and practitioners to explore an alternative, post-capitalist, "grand vision" for HCI, asking what kind of futures the community sees itself as working towards. Are the futures we are building towards any different from those envisioned by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, which are typically neoliberal, absent of strict labour laws, licensing fees, tax declarations and the necessity to deal with government bureaucracy?

New digital technologies such as Blockchain and smart contracting are rapidly changing the face of value exchange, and present exciting new opportunities for designers. This one-day workshop will explore the implications of emerging and future technologies using the lens of Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAOs). DAOs introduce the principle that products and services may soon be owned and managed collectively and not by one person or authority, thus challenging traditional concepts of user communities, ownership and power. The HCI community has recently explored issues related to finance, money and collaborative practice; however, the implications of these emerging but rapidly ascending distributed organisations has not been examined. This one-day participatory workshop will combine presentations, case studies and group work sessions to understand, develop and critique these new forms of distributed power and ownership, and to practically explore how to design interactive products and services which enable, challenge or disrupt these emerging models.

Digital technology is changing, and has changed the ways we create and consume narratives, from moving images and immersive storyworlds to digital long-form and multi-branched story experiences. At the same time, blockchain, the technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, is revolutionizing the way that transactions and exchanges occur. As a globally stored and collaboratively written list of all transactions that have ever taken place within a given system, the blockchain decentralizes money and offers a platform for its creative use. There are already examples of blockchain technologies extending beyond the realm of currency, including the decentralization of domain name servers that are not subject to government takedown and identity management and governance. By framing key blockchain concepts with past and present storytelling practices, this article raises questions as to how the principles and implementation of such distributed ledger technologies might be used within contemporary writing practices – that is, can we imagine stories as a currency or value system? We present three experiments that draw on some of the fundamental principles of blockchain and Bitcoin, as an instantiation of a blockchain implemented application, namely, (1) the ledger, (2) the blocks and (3) the mining process. Each low-fi experiment was intentionally designed to be very accessible to take part in and understand and all were conducted as discrete workshops with different sets of participants. Participants included a cohort of design students, technology industry and design professionals and writing and interaction design academics. Each experiment raised a different set of reflections and subsequent questions on the nature of digital, the linearity (or not) of narratives and collaborative processes.

The honey bee is a powerful cultural motif that remains an important symbol for the future. Their role as pollinators, alongside a myriad of other species, is critical to the continued diets of humankind. This Future Scenario explores a possible near future where human intervention poses new risks to their survival. Drawing on folklore and contemporary beekeeping practices, Mr Shore's Downfall tells a tale of discovery and loss as a young beekeeper is introduced to the world of honey bees. Three imagined artefacts are revealed through the story and discussed with consideration of their cultural context, desirability and relation to socio-economic factors. Themes from Mr Shore's Downfall are examined, and the potential of writing practice for design fiction practitioners is considered.

The honey bee is a powerful cultural motif that remains an important symbol for the future. Their role as pollinators, alongside a myriad of other species, is critical to the continued diets of humankind. This Future Scenario explores a possible near future where human intervention poses new risks to their survival. Drawing on folklore and contemporary beekeeping practices, Mr Shore's Downfall tells a tale of discovery and loss as a young beekeeper is introduced to the world of honey bees. Three imagined artefacts are revealed through the story and discussed with consideration of their cultural context, desirability and relation to socio-economic factors. Themes from Mr Shore's Downfall are examined, and the potential of writing practice for design fiction practitioners is considered.

This paper explores the role and potential for design as process, artefact and experience to help frame and address societal problems. We consider this through examining a future folklore dialogical object, designed to stimulate conversation and question assumptions. Beekeeping is a particularly rich context with which to adopt this methodological approach, given the significance of global threats to insect pollination aligned with beekeeping’s extensive cultural heritage. By drawing on past narratives and contemporary knowledge and practices, the Beespoon, a small copper spoon representing the amount of honey a single bee can make, was codesigned as an experience that actively engaged people with concepts of work, value and pollination. Our design process oscillated across past, present and future stories – the Beespoon as future folklore artefact and experience reflects this complexity, operating across time and value systems to provide new ways to think about how we perceive and understand bees.

The honey bee is a powerful cultural motif that remains an important symbol for the future. Their role as pollinators, alongside a myriad of other species, is critical to the continued diets of humankind. This Future Scenario explores a possible near future where human intervention poses new risks to their survival. Drawing on folklore and contemporary beekeeping practices, Mr Shore's Downfall tells a tale of discovery and loss as a young beekeeper is introduced to the world of honey bees. Three imagined artefacts are revealed through the story and discussed with consideration of their cultural context, desirability and relation to socio-economic factors. Themes from Mr Shore's Downfall are examined, and the potential of writing practice for design fiction practitioners is considered.

column Share on Designing through value constellations Authors: Chris Speed University of Edinburgh University of EdinburghView Profile , Deborah Maxwell Edinburgh College of Art Edinburgh College of ArtView Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 22Issue 5September-October 2015 pp 38–43https://doi.org/10.1145/2807293Published:28 August 2015Publication History 11citation4,553DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations11Total Downloads4,553Last 12 Months721Last 6 weeks97 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

This paper presents two online studies designed to support the building of connections between a group of individuals prior to meeting face-to-face at an intensive residential workshop. The studies were conducted using off-the-shelf tools to create gated online spaces that were incrementally populated with facilitated activities designed to scaffold participant dialogue and interactions. Data gathered during the workshop and at follow-up interviews explored participants’ interactions, motivations for their level of involvement, and their perceived value of the online study. Findings indicate that a) domain based activities are most useful for driving engagement and b) bespoke platforms may be more appropriate than existing platforms. Whilst challenges remain in generating and maintaining engagement, participants who actively took part in the study found it valuable on both an individual basis and in supporting the development of group tacit knowledge.

Blockchain, an innovative public ledger of transactions that underpins digital currencies such as Bitcoin, has the potential to open up and offer radical alternatives to civic life, democracy and society. Yet there is currently only a small, technically savvy section of society who understand its principles. Therefore in order to work through and realize the potential of the blockchain and its transferability across society we need to find means to open up and reduce its 'ineffable' nature. This paper presents and reflects on an approach that made the complexity of the blockchain understandable or 'effable' using physical modeling. The design-based approach adopted a tangible system of Lego and colored stickers to allow participant-actors to physically enact transactions on a Blockchain Lego 'block'. This modeled simplification was not designed as a comprehensive or accurate explanation of Bitcoin and Blockchain but rather as a prompt for opening up rich dialogue and insightful lines of questioning.

This paper is an output of a two day 'Festival Lab' held at the Future Everything Festival, Manchester, UK, March 2015. The Festival Lab invited a team of academic researchers to develop a model of public engagement during the festival that would explore specific research questions around mobility, data awareness, and civic engagement. From this brief the academic team developed the Festival Lab 'PuBLiC', and created an activity arc that involved participants borrowing bicycles and responding to structured and unstructured research questions about the future of cycling and data use in the city of Manchester. Equipped with iPhones with bespoke software for collecting short textual comments, photographs and GPS data, participants became integral actors in one-day field studies, taking the role of both subjects and authors of this paper. We present findings and observations noted by participants and researchers, discussing the significance of these as triangulated in a closing workshop plenary session. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on the paper creation process itself, a collaborative, intensive, fast-paced approach that challenges the very framework of academic authority and public engagement.

Increasingly the role of the university is shifting and its remit broadening. The two traditional missions of the university, teaching and research, have been joined by a ‘third mission’. Whilst the third mission has been defined in a number of different ways, Sam and van der Sijde (2014) argue that either broadly or narrowly defined, it relates to the contribution of the university to socio-economic development. This widening of scope is reflected in the concept of the ‘entrepreneurial university’ wherein the university is transformed into a more entrepreneurial actor engaging in innovation, technology transfer and working with external organizations (Clark, 1998). Thus the role of the university has changed significantly (Audretsch, 2014) and these changes have impacted upon academics themselves (Rinne and Koivula, 2009). Consequently, the environments in which researchers begin their careers have also changed and this, we argue, will impact their expectations and perceptions of their academic career. This paper considers the experiences of Early Career Researchers (ECRs) with respect to the third mission and the broader concept of Knowledge Exchange (KE) focusing on the less discussed Arts and Humanities (A&H) disciplines. Research into ECRs is hindered by the difficulty in defining the population. For instance, Akerlind (2005) emphasises the difficulties in defining postdoctoral researchers with no clear consensus on the role and substantial variations across universities. Moreover employment in academia is often provisional and insecure (McAlpine and Emmioglu, 2014), leading to a shifting population of study. These difficulties are further compounded in the Arts and Humanities where there is a smaller population of ECRs. Laudel and Glaser (2008) note that employment opportunities differ by academic subject, with postdoctoral research positions more common in science disciplines than in the humanities and social sciences. The qualitative data for the research presented in this paper was collected as part of an ECR training programme, Skills in Action, which built a network of A&H ECRs through a series of ‘Digital Salons’ (physical and digital discussions with provocateurs) and a two­day ‘Festival of Skills’ (consisting of interactive workshops and talks from established and peer speakers). Skills in Action participants were largely A&H ECRs but also included doctoral students and a minority of established researchers. Analysing the data gathered across the programme demonstrates that A&H ECRs are critically aware of the challenges they face in the evolving academic landscape, namely undertaking research and developing independent research profiles whilst negotiating fixed term contracts and collaborating with external actors across the private and third sectors. A questionnaire conducted at the festival supported discussions throughout the event, and indicated that A&H ECRs are already actively engaging in external engagement and collaborative practice, viewing it as a vital part of their work. Benefits from taking part in such activities include personal growth and career development, yet recognition of the value of such work is situated within an awareness of the current UK research context. This awareness can influence the extent and type of external engagement conducted by ECRs. The study was exploratory in nature and focused on understanding the UK A&H ECR community through developing and building connections. The sample was relatively small in size ( estimated at 50 ECRs across the digital and physical programme of events ), and self‐selecting, i.e. participants were those that were interested in the skills an d challenges associated with their role. However, the findings indicate that this is an area worthy of further study. The paper sheds light on the experiences of A&H ECRs adding to the body of knowledge about this under‐researched group. Understanding these experiences and perceptions may have practical implications for the University and its approach to ECRs and their academic careers. This paper considers the context of the Arts and Humanities researcher, in particular their attitudes and approach to external engagement, particularly pertinent when considering the third mission and the changing academic culture. Reflection on these practices should therefore be of interest not only to the Arts and Humanities but to all disciplines, as a means of identifying alternative, non‐science based pathways towards achieving the third mission.