From User-Generated Content to Participatory Design

Leuven.
The final paper at EuroITV 2009 is by Liesbeth Huybrechts and Niels Hendriks. He notes the growth in user-generated content and citizen reporting of news events; increasingly, this also involves photos and videos, of course. Such user-generated content is also being explored and exploited by commercial interests, of course - ranging from projects such as the lonelygirl15 hoax to Christopher Allbritton's independently user-funded "Back to Iraq" investigative journalism blog.

Overall, at any rate, this creates opportunities for dispersed creativity that questions existing media authority. There is also a need for 'strange' methods to move beyond the mainstream/new media dichotomy, to make the familiar unusual and treat media as ready-made materials available to use in new and unfamiliar contexts. For example, experience design now needs to be approached as participatory design, and must involve a range of disciplines as well as the users themselves.

The team examined this for example in the context of a home for the elderly, introducing a digital frame which could be used as a social networking tool and examining this process from a design ethnography perspective. Similar projects examined artist collaborations and other processes. This takes an ecological view on new media, which incorporates new media into the wider media environment and observes their impact from a more holistic perspective. This may also product potential media design efforts by the users themselves.

And that's it for EuroITV 2009 - back to Hamburg now...

Technorati : EuroITV 2009, collaboration, euroitv09, participatory design, produsage
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