The 17th Participatory Design Conference will be hosted here in Newcastle Upon Tyne, however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and with a desire to make PDC more inclusive while reducing its carbon footprint, they are holding PDC Places events all over the world.
Open Lab at Newcastle University and Northumbria University are celebrating the end of the Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC), which began in 2015.
What does it feel like to hand over control and do participatory design research with the same participants for over two years? PhD student Peter Glick talks about his experience creating My Care Budget, a wiki to help people manage their Personal Health Budget (PHB) or care budget.
Like most of the UK, Open Lab has been working remotely since the end of March 2020. Despite the pressures of the pandemic, working from home, often in a displaced way, Open Lab has continued to be productive. We have continued to research, to work with our communities, and submit to conferences. However, many of us missed working together in person.
The UK House of Lords voted in favour to include a national perpetrator strategy in the Domestic Abuse Bill, a tentative step forward in the campaign to end violence against women amongst a frustrating week.
As part of the HCI Summer Festival, Not-Equal ran a panel asking how we can work towards the democratisation of access to digital technologies, particularly in response to how communities can work around COVID-19 restrictions.
Emily Barker, Communications Offer at Open Lab, talks about how we along with HCID and North Lab built a virtual festival in less than a month in response to the canceled CHI 2020 conference (along with other conferences) due to the COVID19 pandemic.
Doctoral Trainee Tag Alshehri brought together researchers from different countries for an open discussion reflecting on their experiences, success and struggles in working within cultural and value-sensitive settings in design research, as part of the HCI summer festival.
In the short time span of 90 minutes, three teams of four minds stuck their (virtual) heads together to explore potential approaches to repurpose ‘obsolete’ smartphones, David Verweij and Dan Jackson give a brief summary of the Phone Grown creative sprint from the HCI summer festival.
As part of the HCI Summer festival, Simon Bowen, Alexander Wilson and Sunil Rodger ran the workshop 'Research in the Online Wild' looking at how you can do public consultation during periods of lockdown and social distancing, here is their summary of the discussion.
As part of the HCI Summer Festival, Jennifer Manuel and Sean Peacock ran the Civic Tech and Making Places interactive workshop bringing together a range of people to talk about placemaking and the potential to use civic technology which didn't disappoint.
In the Digital Careers and HCI panel discussion at the HCI Summer Festival, we explored how people with HCI researchers could translate that experience into careers in the digital industry.
Students from Open Lab's Digital Civics CDT have worked with hundreds of schoolchildren to improve their creativity, give them practical skills and connect them with schools on the other side of the world.