The Neighborhood Networks project: a case study of critical engagement and creative expression through participatory design

Abstract

In this paper we examine the Neighborhood Networks project: a community-based participatory design project. The goal of the Neighborhood Networks project is to facilitate and investigate the use of participatory design to prompt critical engagements between people, technology, and the urban environment, and to enable the production of creative expressions of local issues by residents, using robotics and sensing technologies. We describe the activities and outcomes of the first workshop, and discuss how participants used the technology in a rhetorical sense, that is, to discover, invent, and deliver arguments about how we could or should live in the world.