Interactive technologies offer the potential to support new forms of engagement with Cultural Heritage sites and collections, including the possibility of participatory interpretation and the production of polyvocal narratives that might challenge the Authorised Heritage Discourse. To explore this potential, we developed Story Inspiration Station, an interactive museum exhibit using digitised museum objects to prompt reflective engagement amongst visitors. This allowed us to investigate how an interactive exhibit can enable and scaffold deeper engagement with objects and democratises their interpretation through visitors’ exploration of their own and other’s responses to them. Through content analysis of system use and visitor responses (1,514 submissions) and thematic analysis of visitor interviews (n=8) and survey responses (n=6) we provide insights into strategies for deepening engagement with heritage objects and for challenging dominant discourses and provide design considerations for others seeking to digitally support polyvocal engagement with museum collections.

Public transport plays a significant role in people's everyday lives for commuting, business, and leisure purposes. Increasingly, the way the public is able to access information about passenger services has been transformed through digitalisation. Despite these digital transformations there remain very few opportunities for people to become directly involved in shaping the design of public transport at an early stage to reflect their personal preferences and experiences. In this paper, we outline and analyse an innovative digital engagement strategy for new trains on the Tyne and Wear Metro network in North East England. This engagement involved people in the design, specification, and detailed features of a new fleet of trains. This was successful in generating over 33,000 public engagements that, in turn, shaped the design and procurement of the trains prior to construction. We discuss how participatory digital technologies can be used to configure engagement, facilitating critical and constructive commentaries. We describe how centring people's experiences, imagination and curiosity can lead to more meaningful engagement through digitalisation, where the public are not merely the users of transport services but may also be its architects.

Abstract Large scale urban planning consultations can elicit public contributions with limited reflectivity and scope in comparison with participatory projects in HCI. We therefore investigated how digital technology can be configured to enable participation at greater depth and at scale in Metro Futures 2020 – an online public consultation on light rail trains. Drawing on participatory methods used in HCI, we devised experience-centered and creative activities at different depths and scales – from “shallow and wide” social media polls to “deep and narrow” online workshops – and a website with three ways of exploring a digital train mock-up. Participation on the website was both at scale and to notable depth according to our analyses of data entry behavior and website comments. Our findings show that the value of online public consultations can be increased through providing experiential context for design proposals, supporting exploration of design details via immersion, and providing interconnected activities of varying depths and scales.

Participatory heritage approaches have the potential to create more democratic forms of local history and a relational commons around this material. This paper presents an interview-based study with volunteers from a community oral history organisation, to explore their current working practices, particularly around editing and publishing material and to consider volunteers’ feelings and concerns around openness and control of archive material. From the interviews, tensions were found between the desire for openness and concerns around the need for structure, highlighting challenges to address for future work in designing systems for participatory local history projects.

Healthcare services face difficulties in using structured methods for service design and having patient participation in such processes. There are few models on healthcare service design and even less focused on Primary Health Care (PHC) in the literature. Therefore, this paper contributes to this domain by presenting the proposal of a co-creative model to design PHC services. The proposed model was constructed based on the study of reference models in PHC and co-design. Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle and the Experience-Based Co-Design approach were used to structure the model. The resulting model contributes to (a) continuous improvement, (b) improvement analysis and registry, (c) identification and solution of PHC users' real needs, (d) community participation and empowerment, (e) creation of experience-focused and patient-centred services. The model's use of co-creation enables patients and PHC staff to understand each other's needs and challenges, and to create together appropriate solutions to their communities and act toward more satisfying services.

For many living in rural areas, the loss of traditional community assets and increased social fragmentation are a common feature of everyday life. The empty village church is a poignant symbol of these challenges; yet, these are sites that hold considerable potential for new placemaking solutions that respond to the needs of communities today. This means looking beyond "the traditional village church" to recognise a longer history of church adaptation and resilience within the lives of communities. In this paper we ask: how can co-design, projected through a Wicked problems and Clumsy solutions lens, help imagine new futures for communities and their historic churches today? Clumsy solutions consider a plurality of different perspectives on the nature of problems and their resolution to deliver more effective solutions with broad appeal. In the search for clumsiness, we turn to 'long history' and 'slow technology' for inspiration, uncovering deeper resonance with historical communities of place and anchoring that continuity within church sites themselves. Our paper demonstrates how Wicked/Clumsy thinking can account for the challenges faced by rural communities today, bootstrap co-design activities in the development of clumsy solutions, and uncover clumsiness in long history and slow technology dimensions-together laying the foundation for new placemaking strategies.

Online services have become increasingly centralized, drawing on notions of the ‘platform economy’ to focus on ecosystem value rather than user value. In parallel, there have been efforts by developers to augment these platforms, empowering platform users in the process. We explored a 12-month participatory-action project, focusing on redesigning portions of Just Eat, an online aggregator for takeaway food ordering, building upon theoretical perspectives from public health and Digital Civics. We document our experiences in identifying user behaviours and motivations across multiple design workshops, including the design of a web-augmentation–based template to disrupt platform provider behaviours, empower service users and increase individual agency. Through this case study, we identify opportunities and mechanisms for platform modification, linking augmentation to adversarial design with outcomes that have the potential to improve the well-being of platform users.

Online food ordering platforms have changed how many of us purchase takeaway food. They have centralised and streamlined access, providing an opportunity for population-level dietary impact. However, they are currently not human-centred: typically providing limited functionality in support of users' values and dietary considerations; and focused on the provision of food that is broadly characterised as unhealthy. In this paper we explore a redesign of portions of Just Eat , an online takeaway food aggregator, building upon theoretical perspectives from public health. We conducted workshops in 2018 and 2019 to identify user behaviours and motivations then designed a human-centric web augmentation template that could disrupt platform provider behaviours and increase functionality to support users' desires and well-being. We provide a template for lightweight end-user appropriations of food ordering platforms that would enable researchers to explore how health information features could improve individual health and satisfaction, and design guidance for disruptively augmenting existing food ordering platforms (or designing new ones) to enable transparency, personalisation, and self-monitoring to empower users and improve their well-being.

Story:Web is a concept that reconceptualises museum collections as big data, and makes them available as a resource for members of the public and heritage professionals to co-author stories about complex topics such as climate change.Creative commons sounds and images provide a complementary means to understand such topics at an emotive, multisensory, and personal level.Story:Web is also currently a web-based interactive demonstration, and expresses possibilities for the use of cultural heritage, digital technology, and creative media to stimulate thought and action on climate change.

Abstract Experience Based Co-Design (EBCD) has become a popular way of using experience for healthcare service improvement. Despite its popularity, there are few comparative studies on the use of the approach evaluating its enablers and barriers. Here we analyse the barriers and enablers found in literature and of seven projects that used EBCD in the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) and identify scenarios that may contribute to project success. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with EBCD project facilitators showed that the main project barriers were human and organizational barriers, and main enablers were the project facilitator role, the use of narratives, full organizational support, pre-intervention actions and the relationship between service and patients. We conclude that EBCD improvement projects are likely to be successful when key enablers are in place and that active management participation in the process facilitates implementing changes.

This paper discusses how characteristics of experience-centred and collaborative design can be translated to larger scales. We describe Metro Futures, a region-wide public consultation on the design of new light rail trains, where we followed an experience-centred co-design approach supported by digital media and tools to develop findings with a core group of 20 ?co-researchers' and ~4000 public participants. The paper discusses how the characteristics of a focus on experience, and collaborative design exploration were achieved with co-researchers and, at scale, through online and face-to-face interactions using various digital media and tools. Whilst not at the depth of smaller scales, there are opportunities to retain characteristics of experience-centred co-design at scale to produce findings that can usefully inform ensuing design work, and avoid the averaging of public contributions often evident in large scale public consultations.

The collection of papers in this special issue respond to a tension between the broadening scope, scale and heterogeneity of collaborative design research, and an ever-growing demand from funders and regulatory organisations for the measurement and benchmarking of the work researchers do (Wilsdon, 2016). Participatory design and co-design practice produce value in diverse forms, over multiple timescales, captured by different groups against different agendas. In this special issue, we seek to explore how value of, and in, participatory and co-design practices could be understood and captured not only to serve the needs of research assessment - where the mechanisms and regimes of research impact and value tend towards highly defined, contained conceptions of value - but also to enhance the scale, scope and resourcing of collaborative design. To this end, the authors collected here offer perspectives on emerging ethical and political engagements with ‘value’ as a contested terrain. In differing ways, they offer accounts of how we guide, and are guided by, practices of valuation in the complexities of collaborative design situations.

The digital heritage sector has become a highly significant part of the development of cultural heritage. Cultural organisations are increasingly using interactive technology to support the understanding of cultural heritage. This research aims to provide an approach for digital cultural heritage researchers and digital museologists to establish an appropriate position within digital cultural heritage. In this paper, the authors have undertaken a qualitative evaluation of data based on interviews, workshops and fieldwork focusing on potential transcultural audiences, and Chinese/non-Chinese puppetry stakeholders. From these findings, the authors have presented several design suggestions for cultural preservation to surmount transcultural barriers.

In recent years, digital cultural heritage has attracted much attention in the HCI domain, but there are currently few studies that focus on enhancing the appreciation of intangible cultural heritage content amongst cross-cultural audiences. This article reports on the development of a Digital Gesture Library to support cross-cultural appreciation of traditional Chinese puppetry. We describe fieldwork with professional puppeteers to understand their practices and art form, which informed the development of the Digital Gesture Library, which uses a three-perspective archive of puppetry gestures and a tangible interface to support cross-cultural audiences’ appreciation of puppetry and encourages further exploration of Chinese culture. We present findings on the efficacy of the Digital Gesture Library from qualitative and quantitative user studies and, from this, discuss the opportunities and challenges for developing digital technology for cross-cultural appreciation of intangible heritage.

In this paper, we present a two-part study. The first part was a cultural appreciation study. Through this study, we explored the specific approach of cross-cultural aesthetic appreciation and mapped out the potential insights for a prototype design. In the second part, we carried out a design-led study. We designed a tablet application and conducted focus group studies to explore the interactive technology that assists in the support of cross-cultural audiences’ aesthetic appreciation and engagement of traditional Chinese painting. Based on these findings, we went on to further explore an approach of interactive engagement which is specific to supporting cross-cultural appreciation, while also reflecting upon the interactive design suggestions for the development of aesthetic appreciation to offer various transferable insights to the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) community.

Interactive media and technology has the potential to make intangible, hidden, and ‘lost’ aspects of heritage sites engaging and present for visitors. The design of such media and technology should also consider communities as producers of their heritage sites, yet communities may be unfamiliar with the creative and technological possibilities. We describe ongoing creative work with a community group seeking to increase cultural and social use of the medieval Church of St Andrew, and the artworks that enabled us to collectively explore how interactive media and technology could bring the site’s heritage to life. We discuss the value of this multiple making as a productive means for exploring situated and embodied experiences of intangible cultural heritage.

Zaatari, the world's largest Syrian refugee camp, currently hosts around 80,000 Syrian refugees. Located in the desert, the camp has become the fifth biggest city in Jordan. Previous examinations of crisis-housing in refugee camps have assessed re-appropriation of shelters in order to improve functionality. In this paper, we show how interior adornment serves a purpose in refugee lives that goes beyond that of functionality. Our analysis of fieldwork conducted in Zaatari camp show how decorating provides an escape from the camp and compensates for loss of identity, home and leisure. Within contexts of austerity, decorating spaces is a valuable and vital aspect of living, coping and supporting people's sense of identity and pride. Through painting and decorating both public and private 'spaces', refugees transform them into 'places', creating a sense of home. We highlight how the capability of decorating, crafting and making is an enactment of freedom within contexts of political restrictions and resource limitations.

Actuating, dynamic materials offer substantial potential to enhance interior designs but there are currently few examples of how they might be utilized or impact user experiences. As part of a design-led exploration, we have prototyped (Wizard-of-Oz) an actuating, dining table runner (ActuEater1), and then developed a fully-interactive fabric version that both changes shape and colour (ActuEater2). Four in-situ deployments of 'ActuEaters' in different dinner settings and subsequent 'design crits' showed insights into how people perceive, interpret and interact with such slow-technology in interesting (and often unexpected) ways. The results of our 'ActuEating' studies provide evidence for how an actuating artefact can be simultaneously a resource for social engagement and an interactive decorative. In response, we explore design opportunities for situating novel interactive materials in everyday settings, taking the leap into a new generation of interactive spaces, and critically considering new aesthetic possibilities.

Actuating, dynamic materials offer substantial potential to enhance interior designs but there are currently few examples of how they might be utilized or impact user experiences. As part of a design-led exploration, we have prototyped (Wizard-of-Oz) an actuating, dining table runner (ActuEater1), and then developed a fully-interactive fabric version that both changes shape and colour (ActuEater2). Four in-situ deployments of 'ActuEaters' in different dinner settings and subsequent 'design crits' showed insights into how people perceive, interpret and interact with such slow-technology in interesting (and often unexpected) ways. The results of our 'ActuEating' studies provide evidence for how an actuating artefact can be simultaneously a resource for social engagement and an interactive decorative. In response, we explore design opportunities for situating novel interactive materials in everyday settings, taking the leap into a new generation of interactive spaces, and critically considering new aesthetic possibilities.

Recent innovations in online, social and interactive media have led to the emergence of new forms of documentary, such as interactive documentaries ('i-Docs'), with qualities that lend themselves to more open and inclusive production structures. Still, little is known about the experience of making and/or participating-in these kinds of documentary. Our two-year in-the-wild study engaged a large community-of-interest in the production of an i-Doc to explore the ethically-desirable yet challenging aim of enabling multiple subjects to have agency and control over their representation in a documentary. Our study reveals insights into the experiences of participating in an i-Doc and highlights key sociotechnical challenges. We argue that new sociotechnical infrastructure is needed, that frames both 'executory' and 'structural' forms of participation as symbiotic elements of a co-design process.