Strategies for Engaging Communities in Creating Physical Civic Technologies

Despite widespread interest in community and civic technologies, empowering communities to take advantage of these technologies for themselves remains challenging. This paper presents findings from the Hilton Inventors project, which aimed to understand how communities could be supported in performing roles normally carried out by researchers and designers. We describe the end-to-end process of bringing people together around community technologies, designing and prototyping ideas, and ultimately testing several devices in the community. Through this work, we explore different strategies for infrastructuring the community’s participation with technology, including the use of hackathon-like intensive design events and pre-designed kits for assembly. We contribute findings relating to the ability of these strategies to support building communities around civic technology and the challenges that community members faced that must be addressed.